^FLECTIONS OI 
A, 'BEGINNING HUSBAND 



EDWAED S.AKDFOKD MARTIN 



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REFLECTIONS OF 
A BEGINNING HUSBAND 



BY 

EDWARD SANDFORD MARTIN 

AUTHOR OP '^ 

"the luxury of children" 
"lucid intervals," etc. 




HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 

NEW YORK AND LONDON 

MCMXIII 






COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY HARPER ft BROTHERS 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



PUBLISHED APRIL. 1813 



D-N 



)CLA34394o 



CONTENTS 



CHAP. PAGE 

I. By the Second Intention 1 

II. Some Details of Living 27 

III. Commodities and Contentment 52 

IV. The Baby 73 

V. A Contribution from Major Brace 94 

VI. Politics 116 

VII. We Dine Out and Discuss Education .... 125 

VIII. My Prospects Improve 146 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING 
HUSBAND 



REFLECTIONS OF 
A BEGINNING HUSBAND 



D 



BY THE SECOND INTENTION 

EAR Mr. French," my letter began, 

* Cordelia and I have a mind again to 

get married. But having once been engaged 

and quit, we have no mind at all to be engaged 

again and divulge it. Would you mind, please, 

you and Mrs. French, if we eloped .^^ It seems 

so much the more feasible and private way." 

I would rather have broken it to him by word 

of mouth, but for some things it is written words 

or none. If you have determined to elope with 

a man's daughter you can't very well go and 

ask leave of him. Suppose he objects! Of 

course he will object, especially after consulting 

his wife. The only way, if you propose to con- 

1 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

suit him at all, is to write, and mail the letter 
on the way to the church and come back to the 
house afterward for the answer. 

Cordelia felt she just couldn't be publicly 
engaged to me again. Of course I didn't mind. 
I think meanly of the engaged state "per se, but 
I had always rather be engaged to Cordelia than 
not. But that was only because I had always 
wanted to marry her, and had been glad to 
throw any convenient obstacle, even an engage- 
ment, in the way of her marrying any one else. 
The thing that had bothered me was to have the 
engagement end without our being married. I 
wanted to have it die a natural death in church, 
with flowers and a minister, and it had irked me 
very sore indeed to be "released " like a baseball- 
player before the end of the season. It left me 
on a miserably awkward footing with the rest 
of the world and with her, and it left her in the 
same case. Nobody quite knew whether to con- 
gratulate either of us on getting rid of the other. 
People naturally wanted to know why, and of 
course you can't tell in the newspaper. It was 
awkward for our families. There was a feeling 
that they ought to quarrel, because somebody 
must be to blame, and the other side ought to 



BY THE SECOND INTENTION 

resent it. But they didn't want to quarrel, and 
wouldn't; not even a little, to keep up appear- 
ances. They held their tongues and went on 
about their business as before, but inevitably 
flocked more apart than they had been wont to 
do, because when they met it excited too much 
interest. 

I don't mean that they were such conspicuous 
people that the London papers had cables about 
them. It was only that when Mrs. Fessenden 
or Mrs. Somebody Else got home from the 
Jenkinses' tea she told her family, and whom- 
ever she had to dinner, that Mrs. French and 
Harriet and Mrs. Jesup were at the Jenkinses' 
and spoke, as they passed, as politely as though 
nothing had happened. And then would follow 
a little chattering tribute of discourse about 
Cordelia French and Peregrine Jesup, and why 
did they break their engagement, anyway! 

Not that my family, or Cordelia's, got direct 
reports of what was said at Mrs. Fessenden's 
dinner-table. They didn't; at least, not often. 
But they knew what must have been said, and 
families don't like to be subjects of speculation 
or of critical or even compassionate observa- 
tion. They can bear the eye of approval, of 

3 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

admiration, and even of a moderate envy, but 
what family likes to have the Fessendens, the 
Jenkinses, the Underharrows, the Overtons, and 
the rest of the families getting their heads 
together to swap surmises as to what the 
Frenches and the Jesups have got in their 
closet! 

Maybe you'd like to know why Cordelia and 
I loosed hands after our intentions had been 
six months on file. In this private way why 
should I not explain that it was not so much 
the fault of either of us as of the conditions 
of life as we found them. You see, I was 
twenty-three, and Cordelia was two years 
younger. I was studying the profession in 
which I hope to be useful in my day and genera- 
tion, and by the practice of which I hope to 
derive a respectable maintenance from a con- 
tributory world, which Cordelia was already 
inspecting. That's what she was doing. She 
was out of school and looking about, shifting 
from continent to continent to get a better 
view; getting acquainted with people and 
things, ascertaining whom and what she liked 
and what places seemed more joyous to her 
than others. What for so much inspection 

4 



BY THE SECOND INTENTION 

and investigation to prepare her for a destiny 
already measured off, tied up, and waiting to be 
called for? If she had been in college, she might 
possibly have kept. I don't know what are the 
merits of the women's colleges as depositories 
for engaged girls, but they may have a value 
for that use. But a roving life of enlargement 
by travel and social experience has no such 
value at all. There was I, tied up to profes- 
sional studies, on such allowances as my in- 
dulgent parents could afford me without too 
gross injustice to their own family life and their 
obligations to their other dependents. And 
there was Cordelia, diligently qualifying herself 
to live creditably and profitably on an income 
of from twelve thousand a year up. 

You might suppose that ordinary precautions 
would have been taken to prevent her from see- 
ing much of a person so unsuited to her needs as 
I, but they were not. There was nothing 
against me: I had no criminal record, did not 
drink much, was of respectable origin, had 
known Cordelia a long time already, and was 
such a person, in a general way, as she might 
properly enough marry sometime, if circum- 
stances suited. Cordelia came out, and went 

5 



KEFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

to dances and dinners. She had to dance with 
somebody. Male persons of the dancing age 
and disposition with incomes of from twelve 
thousand up are rather scarce. Dances cannot 
be equipped with such alone: neither can din- 
ners. So Cordelia danced with anybody who 
asked her soon enough, and that was often me; 
and she ate her dinner alongside of whoever 
was put next to her, and that was sometimes 
me. And when it wasn't me I wished it was; 
and so what happened, happened all in natural 
course and according to reasonable expectation, 
and nobody ventured to disprove, though doubt- 
less there was a fair volume of conjecture as to 
whose money Cordelia French and Peregrine 
Jesup proposed to get married on. But we 
had not selected anybody to underwrite our 
prospective happiness. We had not got so far 
as that. We had just got irresponsibly engaged, 
according to the American plan and the 
spontaneous promptings of youth and affection. 
What about our current American practice 
of turning most of the girls loose from school 
at eighteen or nineteen and keeping most of 
the youths, who are their natural mates, tied 
up to professional studies or business appren- 



BY THE SECOND INTENTION 

ticeships four or five years longer, and letting 
them play together meanwhile, and expecting 
them to shape their own destinies on practical 
and satisfactory lines? Isn't a good deal ex- 
pected of us young people, all tinder, sparks, and 
indiscretion? The French, they tell me, expect 
less and provide more. I have thought a good 
deal of these concerns since Cordelia and I were 
first engaged and found our intentions un- 
seasonable. Of course, I wanted to be consid- 
ered in Cordelia's plans and deportment; 
wanted, naturally, to have her stay around 
where I could see her at recess and on Sundays 
and other holidays, and perhaps meet her at 
festive gatherings when the urgency of my 
studies permitted me to get to them. I liked 
to have her around handy, but of course I 
could not interdict her from going about, or even 
from going beyond the seas when it suited her 
parents to take her. I could say that she had 
already seen as much of the world and the 
people in it as was necessary, but how was I to 
insist that, while I was cultivating and improv- 
ing my abilities all I knew how, Cordelia should 
let most of hers lie fallow and mark time and 

wait? If she had only had a steady job to work 
2 7 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

at in the intermission while I was quahfying 
myself to work at mine, things might have 
worked out serenely; but the only job she had 
was to get married, and meanwhile to cheer 
and satisfy her parents, and try to be worth 
her keep to them while she was making ac- 
quaintance with the world. Marriage seems 
to be a complete occupation (circumstances be- 
ing favorable), but being engaged isn't. It's 
just a makeshift, delightful for six weeks, very 
suitable for three months, and tolerable for six; 
but when it contemplates indefinite extension 
into uncertain years it is an asset of very 
doubtful value to a girl in active social life. 
When the Frenches found that Cordelia seemed 
to be losing interest in affairs, was indifferent 
to dances and dinners, was apt to be abandoned 
by mankind to the society of chaperones, was 
getting left out of house-parties that I could 
not go to, was gently indisposed to put the sea 
or any wide expanse of land between herself and 
me, and was rather aggravated than appeased 
by the little she could see of me when I was 
near, they said — the parents did: "This isn't 
working to much of a charm ! Nobody is ahead 
on it, and we are getting behind. Cordelia's 

8 



BY THE SECOND INTENTION 

no fun any more, and there is no end of it in 
sight." 

And soon after Cordelia and I called our 
engagement off, much to our grief and with the 
sympathy of our elders. I advised her to put 
me down to the account of experience, and try 
to figure out a profit on me, if she could. But 
I never put her down to account of anything, 
being of just the same mind about her that I 
always had been, though grievously put out to 
leave her blooming on the paternal bush with- 
out any "hands-off " sign on her, protected only 
by her natural thorns. 

There was a line in the paper to say the en- 
gagement was off, Cordelia went abroad again, 
I continued my studies, and time went on. It 
does go on somehow; the trick is to keep on 
going with it. Who does that, gets somewhere 
in spite of impediments, lacerations of the 
affections, and all misgivings about the possi- 
bility of there being a gap anywhere in the pro- 
cession of self-supporters that a new aspirant 
can fit himself into. I have been called "sensi- 
ble." It seems a painfully tame thing to be, 
and I presume I was called so by way of dis- 
paragement. But, after all, there are times 

9 



HEFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

when there is no choice but between being 
sensible and being silly, and then you have just 
got to be sensible if you can, no matter how it 
tastes. Being sensible, while one is working 
to get a start in life, must be excused, because 
it is the price of adventure, indiscretion, specu- 
lation — all the really glorious and spectacular 
parts of human existence. 

Three years I was sensible and plugged away 
at my job, learning the rudiments and then the 
application of them. All that time I had never 
a word with Cordelia. How could I.^^ I could 
not go on where I left off, and unless, or until, 
I could do that, how could I go on at alLf^ Sight 
of her I did have now and then, but seldom; 
for, though she was often in town and I nearly 
always there, our occupations usually kept us 
from accidental meetings. We didn't travel 
the same beats. 

I finished my professional studies, sustained 
the tests provided to measure my proficiency, 
and got a job in an oflSce with a small salary 
and some prospects. Candor requires that I 
admit that I passed those examinations pretty 
well, for really I had not spared work in the long- 
preparation for them. 

10 



BY THE SECOND INTENTION 

And the job I got was a good one as beginners' 
jobs go, and the prospects were as good, so far 
as I could see, as the prospects of anybody of 
my time of life and in my line of endeavor. So 
I didn't see why, barring accidents, I should 
not get somewhere presently. 

So the months sped. Coming early up-town 
on a late October day, I got into a pay-as-you- 
enter car at Forty-second Street, and there was 
Cordelia, alone and with a seat vacant beside 
her, which I took. 

"This is a fine day," said I, "and you be- 
come it very much, and I hope you have good 
health.?" 

"Oh yes," said Cordelia. 

"And good spirits?" said I. 

"Oh yes;" but she said it more doubtfully 
and with no more than a languid affirmation. 

"And I hope that sport is good," said I; and 
she assented to that, but in a way that sug- 
gested that it might be more boisterously satis- 
factory. And with that we fell into discourse, 
trifling but easy, and that progressed in its tone 
from easy to friendly, and from friendly to 
old -friendly. And I let the car pass Fifty- 
fourth Street and pretended to myself I was 

11 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

going to Fifty -ninth, and let it pass Fifty- 
ninth and pretended nothing further to myself. 
It wasn't until some days later that I learned 
that her intended destination was Fifty-seventh 
Street. As it was, while rolling through the 
Sixties we each cautiously discovered that we 
were bound for the Museum at Eighty-second 
Street, and there we got off; and since it was, 
as I pointed out to her, too lovely an autumn 
day to go indoors, we went and sat down in the 
Park instead, and there, a little off the track 
of passers-by, fell into discussion of the condi- 
tions of contemporary existence. 

"CordeUa," said I, "are you having any fun?" 

She meditated a moment. Three years is a 

long time in the early twenties, and Cordelia 

had grown perceptibly thoughtfuler since she 

and I left off. 

"Fun? Oh yes, I have some. It has been 
a pleasant summer. We went abroad in the 
spring, and it was nice in the country after we 
got home. People were sometimes interesting; 
some of the books were good to read; I hked 
the flowers in the garden, and I liked to ride a 
horse, and sometimes motoring was pleasant, 
and the swimming and the sailing." 

12 



BY THE SECOND INTENTION 

I confess that my heart settled back a bit at 
this Hst of profitable occupations. "Are you 
marrying any one this fall, Cordelia?" said I. 
"Have you an interesting line of suitors now? 
Or can it be that being well off you have the 
unusual discretion to realize it?" 

"Oh, I realize it; yes, a good deal. But I 
am only temporarily well off." 

"What's the matter? Father's stocks look 
shaky to you?" 

"Oh no. Father doesn't seem anxious." 

"Suitors, maybe. Perhaps you feel yourself 
near capitulation?" 

"Possibly! But I have not diagnosed it so." 

"Down there where you spend your sum- 
mers there are stock-brokers growing on every 
bush, and the stock-brokers, you know, Cor- 
delia, are the only young men — except the 
hereditary rich — who have money enough to 
get married on." 

"Why didn't you turn to that yourself. 
Peregrine?" 

"I? Bless you! I never had a chance. 
Nobody ever seemed to see the making of a 
stock-broker in me. And besides — well, I con- 
fess I have never felt drawn to that vocation. 

13 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

I would like uncommonly well to earn plenty 
of money, and I mean to, sometime; but I'd 
rather have the pay seem more like an incident 
of my job than have my job an incident of 
my pay." 

"I'm afraid you are not a really earnest 
money-maker. Peregrine?" 

"Just wait till I get a chance to throw in my 
clutch; then you'll see! And I'll soon begin 
to get it now! But if you think well of the 
stock-broker calling, Cordelia, there was Archi- 
bald Tassel. I heard of him as having the dis- 
cernment to be your warm admirer; and a 
wholesome, hearty young man too, and well 
found. And yet you seem never to have smiled 
on him.^" 

"So.?" 

"It must be you don't care for a sporting 
life. Well, I am only moderately drawn to it 
myself. You have to work so hard and pay 
so high for what you get, and it's so hard on the 
tissues, and you get so little in the end. But 
there was that cheerful young Van Terminal, 
Cordelia; pockets bulging with ancestral coin; 
nice manners, immense energy, large appetite for 
pleasure, four or five automobiles in his garage, 

14 



BY THE SECOND INTENTION 

and a private tank of gasolene with a pipe-line 
connection with Hunters Point. If there is an 
eligible young man about, it is Corlear Van 
Terminal, and yet, Cordelia — " 

"Mercy, Peregrine, would you have me 
marry him?" 

"Oh no! By no means. No! NoT I never 
was the least keen to have you. But why didn't 
you?" 

"Why should I?" 

"Everything money can buy, and not such 
a bad encumbrance. Amiable young man 
enough, and you with your great qualifications 
for companionship and direction might have 
kept him out of serious mischief all his days. 
I don't say you could have done it, but it was 
conceivably possible." 

"He's very nice and so jocund. Mother and 
I were much pleased with him — are still. I 
don't know what efforts I should have made if 
it hadn't been for father." 

"What did he say?" 

"I hardly like to tell you!" 

"Oh yes, do!" 

"He said: *Good God! Cordelia. Not that 
one! W^ait, and perhaps you may catch a man! 

15 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

Leave those joyous natures to marry chorus 
girls,' he said, and told me I was built for some- 
thing better than to be the ballast for a joy- 
rider's motor-car. That's just like father. 
He's not very practical. But it flattered me, 
and I didn't try after that." 

"Poor girl! What a father! What a tre- 
mendous handicap parents are, anyway!" 

"You needn't complain of father. That was 
the only time he meddled. He has done his 
best for me. He knows admirable young men! 
* Father's friends,' I call them. Somehow they 
never make up to me. But I'm improving; 
I know I am. I think so much my hair is com- 
ing out, and the day may come when I shall 
find grace in the eyes of one of * father's friends.' " 

"Oh no! Cordelia, don't! I have a better 
plan for you. I know such a good young man, 
who has needed you with gnawing destitution, 
night and day going on four years." 

"How interesting! The poor young man! 
Destitute of me and I suppose of all the other 
goods of this world, and mortgaged besides for 
the support of his aged grandmother! I beg 
you, Peregrine, not to attempt to entangle me 
with impossible good young men. Life is too 

16 



BY THE SECOND INTENTION 

fleeting. The American spring is too short. 
All in a minute is it summer, and to-morrow 
comes Fourth of July and haytime, and we are 
cut down and cast into the oven." 

"Well, dear Cordelia, take a broker — take 
a broker! Or some nice old gentleman; or a 
widower or something, with ready-made shekels 
strung on him!" 

"Don't be unkind to me, Peregrine!" 
"Oh, well — I was telling you — where was I? 
You put me all out when you speak like that. 
Oh yes — the good young destitute man ! Well, 
the good young man has no grandmother to 
support — only himself as yet, and can do that, 
by George! And it's time; he's rising twenty- 
seven. And his prospects are not bad now. 
And if he could manage to get married they'd 
be better; they'd have to be. You see, we 
have to get one thing at a time, and I've known 
awful cases — even I in my short experience 
have observed them — of men who waited until 
they had got a good living before they got 
married, and found, when they got ready to 
get a wife, that their minds had been on other 
things so long that they had clean forgotten 
how. That's awful, isn't it.^^ It happens all 

17 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

the time. I see it at the clubs. I don't want 
it to happen to — to the good young semi- 
destitute man I had in mind." 

"Oh no, Peregrine; surely not. It's an aw- 
ful thought; awful! But yet, suppose he got 
the girl, what — " 

"What costs so dreadfully much, Cordelia.^^ 
I know of quite a decent flat for fifty dollars 
a month; a nice flat over a tailor shop, and not 
in Harlem either — ^not twenty blocks from where 
we're sitting. And for three dollars a day you 
can get food enough for two or three persons 
— eggs not superlatively fresh, perhaps, but 
eggs — and for a dollar a day you can hire a 
very good servant, and that's only a little more 
than forty dollars a week; and a good young 
man of twenty-seven, with four or five years of 
hard work behind him, who can't see his way 
to lay his hands on at least sixty dollars a week 
isn't good enough for you. But sixty would 
about do it, Cordelia. Sixty plunks is a great 
deal of money — a whole lot of money to earn — 
but not an unattainable wage; not one that a 
diligent and competent trained hand need con- 
sider the limit of his aspirations — ^no, not in a 
city like this with a traction company to be 

18 



BY THE SECOND INTENTION 

supported, and eighty million people in the 
back country to help pay five millions of us 
for living here." 

"You are a more calculating person than you 
used to be, Peregrine. When did you work all 
that out.'^ And suppose it were possible to live 
on sixty dollars a week, what makes you think 
it would pay to do it, and why do most people 
of our habits think they need so very much 
more?" 

"The trouble with them is they haven't been 
emancipated. The things that cost are amuse- 
ment and social aspirations. If you can cut 
those out for a time, living is not so impossibly 
dear. But stupid people can't do it, and un- 
emancipated people don't dare to." 

"Unemancipated.f^ Unemancipated ! Unem- 
ancipated from what. Peregrine.^" 

"From things, Cordelia, and the habit of 
needing them in superfluous quantity; from 
the standards of living set by people who are 
poor on fifty thousand a year; from the idea 
of life that is based on what you have got; from 
automobiles, and expensive sports, and boxes 
at the opera; from the notion that it is essential 
to keep in the swim, and know only the right 

19 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

people; from pleasures and from people that 
waste time and money and give nothing back 
that is worth having." 

"My! Peregrine! When did you turn an- 
archist?" 

"Not long after our engagement was broken. 
I loved you, Cordelia, that's the truth, and I 
hated everything that broke it. I learned to 
see that there was no obstacle between you and 
me that a little time and hard work could not 
easily overcome, and that the obstacles that 
looked biggest and blackest had no real sub- 
stance to them, and could be brushed aside 
whenever we were ready and had the grit to 
do it. Don't cry, Cordelia! If you let me 
hold your hand again, I don't think any one 
would notice." 

"I was — I wasn't crying. Peregrine. I — I 
was — only thinking!'* 

"Don't cry! Because this is such a delight- 
ful world for folks who are free and can work, 
and have the courage to shape their own courses. 
It looks all lovely colors to me, with you here — 
so much to get and such an interesting stunt 
to get to it; so much to do, and such inspirations 
for the doing of it; such excellent loads to lift 

20 



BY THE SECOND INTENTION 

at and maybe shoulder. Think, CordeHa, 
think by all means! That is the most fun 
there is, and the most we shall either of us get 
for some time to come if you marry me on 
sixty dollars a week. Oh dear! There were 
times when I feared you weren't going to wait! 
Those were the worst pinches of the pull. To 
get tired and have no heart of refuge to fly to — 
you know that is pretty trying, Cordelia." 

"I know. Peregrine. And to wait with 
folded hands and not know — it tries the faith. 
A bunch of roses on my birthday, a bunch of 
roses on Christmas morning, not a line with 
either of them! Oh, Peregrine!" 

"There! Nobody saw us but the squirrel! 
'Far out of sight, while sorrows still enfold us, 
lies the fair country where our hearts abide.' 
Do you know that hymn, Cordelia.f^ There 
were days together when it ran in my head. 
It meant heaven to whoever wrote it, but to 
me it meant a fifty-dollar-a-month flat and 

you." 

"Don't cry. Peregrine!" 

"I wasn't crying. But you must allow a 
man some sentiment. Are you game for the 
flat and sixty dollars a week.f^" 

21 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

"Let us look at the flat. I hope all the 
rooms are not cupboards. Do you know that 
my aunt just passed on the drive in a victoria.? 
Gracious ! I have just time to get home before 
dark and dinner." 

That was the substance of the discourse we 
had that autumn day. I never mailed that 
letter I wrote to Cordelia's father. We con- 
cluded that it would not be polite to our parents 
to elope, and, since we both had very indulgent 
parents, what was the use! So I broke it to 
the old man, and he was quite reasonable and 
let me stay to dinner, and we had champagne. 
And Cordelia's mother was kind, too, and though 
she declared that I was as bad a match as any 
worldly-wise woman could ask for, she felt that 
Cordelia had come as nearly to years of marital 
discretion as women who get married ever 
come, and that it was certainly time she knew 
whether I was the ineligible man she wanted 
or not. 

So I told my own parents, too, and my father 
smiled and said more marriages hereabouts 
seemed to be spoiled nowadays by too much 
money than by too little; and my mother shed 
some tears, but they were not tears of discon- 

22 



BY THE SECOND INTENTION 

tent. She has begun to be interested in my 
trousseau, and keeps suggesting things that I 
had better buy and have charged to Father, 
and I hear of her being seen in the neighbor- 
hood of auction shops where they sell furniture, 
and she has counseled me by no means to 
trench upon Great-aunt Susan's legacy, which 
constitutes the total sum of my private for- 
tune. It is not a large legacy, and how I shall 
ever add anything to it, except Cordelia, I 
cannot imagine; but I am going to somehow, 
and meanwhile Cordelia will be an immense 
asset and make me a rich man at the start. 

Perhaps Aunt Susan's legacy will start on 
its career as the total fortune of a married man 
by a period of depletion; for the truth is I am 
not taking in the whole of sixty dollars a week 
at the present juncture. It is no great income 
to command at twenty-seven if one has begun 
his money-getting at seventeen, but it is a great 
deal for any one of that age who has spent 
three or four years in general enlargement of 
the ideas and experiences in a college and three 
or four more in learning how to do something 
that will support life. 

I observe that elders are fairly willing to abet 
3 23 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

the young in getting married if only the adven- 
turers are positively enough set on the adven- 
ture and have the courage of their intentions. 
The thing that the wiser elders won't do if they 
can help it is to take responsibility about the 
intending parties being pleased with their bar- 
gain. For the rest, un,less the adventure is too 
rash or premature, or they have violent per- 
sonal objections, the elders, as far as I see, are 
apt to be complaisant, and even to push along 
an affair that is clearly at the stage where it is 
safe to push it. 

The cards are out for three weeks from next 
Thursday. It was the first our friends in gen- 
eral heard of it, which was as it should be. The 
flat is hired, and yesterday I got my pay raised 
five a week. Where there's a will there's a way 
to break it, the lawyers say, but Cordelia and 
I have passed through that once, and our will 
is going to probate this time. 

I am thinking about what we shall talk about, 
for talk will have to be our main reliance for 
entertainment. There's a fireplace in the flat, 
and I dare say I shall be seen going home 
dragging boards and boxes after me like the 
children one sees in the street, for I don't know 

24 



BY THE SECOND INTENTION 

how we shall afford any wood for that fireplace. 
Wood, I understand, is dear. Never mind; 
we shall have a fire and sit before it, and talk 
about everything — about votes for women 
(which I don't want, though it matters little), 
whether we ought to be abstainers (I'd rather 
not, but it matters little), whether the good 
English are played out, about the future of the 
Roman Catholic Church in the United States, 
whether it isn't time for the Democrats to shelve 
Thomas Jefferson and get a new prophet, 
whether Tammany will ever be killed per- 
manently dead and what then, whether the 
People have got any sense, whether legislation 
has an important effect upon divorce, whether 
the Americans are too much bent on substi- 
tuting legislation for character, and all those 
things that one thinks about. 

I wonder if she will be willing to talk about 
those things! Very likely she won't. It will 
be more prudent, I think, not to let her see the 
catalogue of them beforehand. Unless brought 
up to them gently she might shy. One talks, I 
find, to another person a good deal according 
to what is in the other person's mind. 

And for a change we can gossip, and extenuate 

25 



HEFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

our neighbor's faults, first agreeing what they 
are, which always is a pleasant exercise. And 
when somebody makes a good book with real 
meat in it, well served — if any one should — we 
can read it, and that's fun, and cheap, and will 
make more talk. And charities are interesting 
if one goes at them right (and cheap as things 
go), and so are politics. 

It is such an interesting world if you get the 
hang at all of what is going on in it, and why, 
and whither things are tending! I do love to 
see it roll along and to try to puzzle out why 
things happen as they do. It will be fun to 
talk to Cordelia about all these matters. What 
is there about a woman's mind — if it is a fairly 
good one — that it is so extraordinarily stimu- 
lating to a man's mind, so that when you're too 
tired to talk to a man you can chatter on 
amazingly to a woman, provided she's the right 
one! They beat drink; they certainly do! 
They are the great natural stimulant and tonic 
for mankind. 



n 

SOME DETAILS OF LIVING 

CORDELIA and I duly got married (see the 
newspaper a piece back) and are still mar- 
ried, and, speaking for myself and, as far as 
observation enables me, for Cordelia, we are still 
pleased with our audacious experiment. But 
why should I call it audacious? I am more and 
more impressed, so far, with the calculating 
prudence of it, and surely sensible observers 
must agree with me, and for ten who will think 
we were rash to get married on sixty dollars a 
week there will be hundreds, certainly, who 
will smile at the idea of that being a doubtful 
income to marry on. 

Our maid, Matilda Finn, is a person of con- 
siderable talent. I doubt whether two people 
who aim to subsist on sixty dollars a week are 
entitled to have a maid at all. I dare say they 
belong in a boarding-house, or else in a flat 
where they do their own work and put at least 

27 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

fifty dollars in the bank the first of every 
month. Oh, delightful thought! Imagine be- 
ing six hundred dollars to the good at the end 
of the year, and putting it into some safe gam- 
ble that would be the corner-stone of a com- 
petence! And if I had only courted Matilda 
Finn instead of Cordelia it would have been so 
easy! Do you remember Andrew Cannybee 
and his first investment in Pullman? But he 
was living with his mother then and had few 
expenses. I suppose the money-savers are 
folks who go without everything they want 
except money until they cease to want it. That 
would have been all right if I had wanted 
Matilda Finn. I know I could have held my- 
self down to self-denial until I could really 
afford to marry, and by that time I should have 
got over wanting Matilda. Whereas I never 
could endure the thought of not wanting Cor- 
delia. I am afraid the Cannybee strain in me 
isn't strong enough to do any good. I seem to 
like life while it is here. 

All the same I like Matilda, who is part of 
life at these presents, and so does Cordelia. 
Matilda is cheerful, she is clean and indulgent, 
and she can cook. When food is scarce and 

«8 



SOME DETAILS OF LIVING 

dear and you have to have it, you don't want 
to have it fooled with by the wasteful or the 
inexpert. The little that man wants here below 
he has to have two or three times a day, and it 
does make a difference how it is fixed up for 
him. Consider the staples of nourishment — 
bread, toast, tea, coffee, bacon, eggs, chickens, 
chops, beefsteak, fish, codfish, oysters, clams, 
lettuce, rice, beans, milk, and the package 
foods that some of us eat for breakfast to 
divert our minds from diet! How various are 
the dealings of the human mind and hand with 
these simple alimentary provisions! What 
grace or defect of human character is there that 
cannot find its demonstration in the way an egg 
is dropped on toast! There is as much dif- 
ference in toast as there is in people; there is 
a great native difference in eggs, and much in- 
dividuality; no two slabs of bacon are alike 
to start with, or are affected quite the same by 
smoke and other processes of education. When 
it comes to coffee, what a problem! Leaving 
out all the coffee that is not coffee at all, con- 
sider the horde of coffees that are coffee; their 
propensity to masquerade under names that 
do not belong to them, to be blended, and to 

29 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

taste unexpectedly every time you get a new 
lot! 

But give the coffees their due. Nearly all of 
them are good. It is only that some of them 
are enough better than others to interest an 
aspiring spirit which reaches out instinctively 
in the direction of the highest good for the 
money. Such a spirit will early recognize that, 
food being variable, the mind that prepares it 
should be constant and sagacious in its pro- 
cesses. 

I would not have you suppose I am an epi- 
cure. I never think much about food unless 
it is not so good as I think it ought to be, all 
things considered; or else is better than I ex- 
pected. There needs to be some standard of 
nourishment in a family, and in our family of 
three it has to be adjusted to an expenditure 
of three dollars a daj^ Cordelia says that I 
contribute the standard and the dollars and 
leave her to furnish the adjustment. That is 
where Matilda Finn comes in. I asked IVIrs. 
French once if Cordelia could cook — asked her 
quite casually, and not, of course, as though it 
was of any consequence. She said yes, that 

every woman could cook, and that Cordelia 

so 



SOME DETAILS OF LIVING 

could, of course, and that the question was 
whether any man could live off her cooking. 
She has taken cooking lessons since then and 
courses in Domestic Science, which includes 
cooking, and I think she can do it. But cook- 
ing is an agitating job, and I don't like to have 
Cordelia agitated. Nor is there any need. I 
like better to have her stick to her own pro- 
fession, which is ministering to happiness. I 
suppose they don't teach that in the domestic- 
science courses. Cordelia ministers to Matilda 
Finn's happiness, and Matilda cooks and does 
all the other things that need to be done in a 
flat, except what Cordelia and I do; and Cor- 
delia ministers to my happiness remarkably. 
All sorts and conditions of folks Cordelia min- 
isters to: she has captivated her mother's 
market-man, with whom she talks meat, poul- 
try, fish, politics, and current events every 
morning. She knows all his reasons for the 
high price of meat. "That man," she said the 
other day, "can bamboozle me into anything!" 
Nevertheless, she seems to be getting intimately 
acquainted with the butcher business and the 
anatomy of the animals on which we elect to 
subsist, and the comparative cost and edible- 

31 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

ness of tlieir various sections. The spring lamb 
that we had for dinner the day Caseby dined 
with us was "a bargain I got off of Mr. Cooper," 
who had an oversupply of fore quarters and 
sold one at a great reduction to young Mrs. 
Jesup. As a rule, we do not subsist on spring 
lamb at home in the spring. That seems to be 
a favorite dinner-party provision, and we still 
dine out enough to keep up our acquaintance 
with it. The "lamb" we have is the most 
neutral of all meats, unexciting, but sufficient 
for the purpose of nourishment. 

Cordelia sings at her work, and that makes 
me think she must like the life. Perhaps I 
should say her employments rather than her 
work. Being away all day, I don't know very 
much about them, but at least I hear her sing- 
ing while she is putting up her hair. 

This matter of woman's work looks impor- 
tant. I wonder what they do all day — girls, 
that is, like Cordelia. If she had a job it would 
simplify matters, particularly if it was a re- 
munerated job, for I dare say Cordelia would 
spend more money if she had it. / could. 
But it would have to be some kind of an inde- 
pendent home job, like painting or writing or 



SOME DETAILS OF LIVING 

taking in washing. If she went out to work 
and had any boss but me, it would not be 
tolerable. Moreover, if she had a job that she 
was qualified for and was worthy of her talents, 
she would probably be better at it than I am 
at mine and earn more at it than I do, and 
then where would I come in ! Think of us both 
coming home tired from wage-earning ! Awful ! 
I am glad she has no job except, as I said be- 
fore, the great one of ministering to happiness. 
I seem to be just a poor old-fashioned monop- 
olist, not much farther along than the Stone 
Age. 

But she does keep busy in a way. I hear of 
her making calls — though she says calls are a 
queer employment for a lady who lives over a 
tailor shop — and she goes to see her mother, 
and my mother, and various girls, and goes to 
market, and sews a little and reads a little and 
does charities a good deal, and has girls in to 
lunch and feeds them on I don't know what. 
She says it's not wise to break with the life you 
know any more than you have to, and of course 
that's so; though neither is it wise to hang on 
to the life you know when you can't afford it. 
The life you know isn't the only good one even 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

for you. I have come to feel that tremendously 
since I turned anarchist — to feel that life is a 
big thing, a bully thing, and that we are fools 
to cramp it and trim it down too much to fit 
usage and environment. Friends are very 
valuable, acquaintance is valuable, a standard 
of living and a set of associations when once 
you are used to them are very hard to shift 
from; but all those things are the accessories 
of life rather than life itself, and it seems a 
chicken-hearted sort of prudence that would 
sacrifice life to its accessories. 

This from a man who is as sensitive as I am 
to the differences in dropped eggs, and feels as 
strongly as I do about fish-balls and bacon, and 
who likes caviare when it is really good, and 
alligator-pears, and pates of goose-livers, may 
sound a little forced; but must it follow that 
because one sees and admires the trees he can- 
not see the forest.^ 

Yes, I am glad Cordelia has no money- 
making job, but I suppose that is no argument 
against such employments for women in general 
who need them. 7, being so gifted in money- 
getting and commanding the income I do, did 
not need to have my labors supplemented in 

34 



SOME DETAILS OF LIVING 

the wage-earning line. My need was for 
assistance in spending our money. 

By the way, as I meditate on money and my 
large appetite for it and the ways of getting it, 
it occurs to me that there is a new profession — 
muck-raking. Maybe it's not new, since noth- 
ing is, but at any rate it's coming along on a 
good slant just now, is very lively, looks al- 
truistic, and I dare say can be made modestly 
remunerative; for muck-rakers, of course, like 
other working folks, must live. More than 
moderately remunerative it can hardly be with- 
out spoiling it, for the great business opportunity 
in it would be to make a great record as a pros- 
ecutor and then be retained for the defense. 
To me, as a lawyer, that looks good, but there 
are those who would gibe at it as a sort of black- 
mail. 

Well, there does seem to be a lot of tar in 
money. Sometimes I despair of ever getting 
enough to keep an auto on without having to 
pay some impossibly defiling or enslaving price 
for it; but I haven't got to have an auto yet, 
so I take courage. 

Father and Father-in-law both growl at the 
muck-rakers, as is proper enough for gentlemen 

35 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

of their years and responsibilities, but the muck- 
rakers look to me like microbes of a very natural 
and timely kind, lawfully and inevitably pro- 
duced, and going about a necessary business 
with a catching sort of enthusiasm. When they 
beat a bad grab, the anarchist in me insists upon 
rejoicing, no matter what respect the lawyer in 
me may feel for clients who appreciate lawyers 
and pay them suitably. 

Father-in-law has sent me three gallons of 
superior European champagne put up in bottles 
the usual way, mostly pints. He is a kind man. 
Why he thinks it wise to cultivate expensive 
thirsts in CordeHa and me I do not know, but 
my theory is that he thinks a taste for bever- 
ages that we can't afford will make for ab- 
stemiousness. So it will, I dare say, Cordelia 
says the gallons are just a tribute of affection, 
unsullied by ulterior purposes of any sort. We 
are going to ask Father-in-law to dinner, and 
that is a great tribute, for even reduced to his 
simplest needs he is expensive to feed. 

Naturalists have observed and recorded a 
tendency in married people to duplication. 
That is, in some respects, a solemn thought. I 
understand you can get lots more room in 

36 



SOME DETAILS OF LIVING 

Brooklyn for the same money, and people do 
it; but to me that's a much more solemn 
thought than the other one — too solemn alto- 
gether. Up the island there are extraordinary 
rows and successions of human hives. Cor- 
delia and I catch a Sunday afternoon auto- 
mobile ride up there once in a while and marvel 
at them as we pass. One could get a fine de- 
tachment up there; though for that matter 
there is an interesting grade of detachment to 
be had in Brooklyn. And detachment has its 
value — breaks habits, brings folks in some ways 
harder up against the facts of life, invites a new 
inspection of people, brings various releases 
and stimulations — but I don't know that it is 
a thing that Cordelia and I are disposed to 
chase very hard for its own sake. We are hard 
enough up against the facts of life as it is, and 
we are gregarious people and like companions, 
and if we got a good detachment would go right 
to work, I suppose, to mitigate it by new asso- 
ciations. We will never move to Harlem or 
beyond merely for the sake of pioneering, nor 
swap associations for the mere benefit of swap- 
ping. And yet that's what the Methodist 
ministers used to do under the old three-years- 

37 



*.<k 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

in-a-place rule — may be doing it still. It was 
the intention that they should gather no moss, 
so the plan was to keep them rolling. To me, 
now, moss looks very nice, and I wouldn't mind 
its adhering. I love old associations and per- 
manence of relation, and my heart is even hos- 
pitable to some fixity of condition; but there 
is plenty to be said in favor of wearing the gar- 
ments of life loose enough to shed them when 
they get seriously in the way. One should be 
enough of a change artist to quit a part he can- 
not excel in before the scene-shifters shut him 
out. The predicament of people who haven't 
it in them to prosper in the social level they 
find themselves in, and who are so fettered by 
the conventions and expectations of that level 
that they can't break into another, is very 
pathetic. We hear plenty about the tragedies 
of families that sink, but what of the tragedies 
of those that rise, as when a man makes a raft 
of money and his sons experiment with leisure, 
drink, chorus-girls, and divorce; and his 
daughter, for lack of inviting marital oppor- 
tunities, is obliged to elope with the chauffeur! 
That sounds better than eloping with the coach- 
man, as used to happen; but still there is a 

38 



SOME DETAILS OF LIVING 

prejudice against it. Of course advantages — 
most of them — are advantageous, else civiliza- 
tion wouldn't get ahead; but, by George! 
they have their price. If Cordelia and I were 
a grain less stylish we might be living in a 
model tenement and saving money. (I won- 
der if we could get one that would hold Matilda 
too!) The residents of New York around here 
where we live are roughly divided into two 
classes, people who eat in the front basement 
and are getting rich, and people who are too 
stylish to eat in the front basement, and have 
upstairs dining-rooms and butler's pantries, 
and are (some of them) getting poor. The 
receipt for getting rich in this neighborhood is 
— Eat in the basement! But I'm not sure that 
it is a reliable receipt. It tends to blight some 
opportunities. Anyhow, it does not fit the 
ambitions of the socially ambitious of this gen- 
eration, to whom eating in the basement would 
seem to conflict with about all that is delect- 
able in life. Of course basement dining-rooms 
belong to the habits of forty years ago, and in- 
vited the simple life, which now for the most 
part has been chased into flats. But the truth 
remains that advantages are bought with a price. 

4 39 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

It is harder to get something for nothing 
than we think it is when we read of wills going 
to probate. They do go there, and then it is 
to observe whether the heirs get the money or 
the money gets the heirs. We don't take 
medicine unless we are sick. Money in large 
chunks is pretty strong medicine, but we take 
it when it offers without regard to our condi- 
tion, and it does not always do us good. 

Tom Merchant was saying something the 
other day to the effect that a man could not 
be of very considerable use in the world until 
he ceased to be dependent on his work for his 
living. Of course that is not so, as Lincoln's 
case and innumerable others attest, and as new 
cases keep attesting every day. Nevertheless, 
the venerable John Bigelow has said something 
very like what Tom said, and I think there is 
a slice of truth in it. Money in store is power, 
and makes for leisure to think and act, and 
may help enormously, in a crisis, to indepen- 
dence in thought and action. Lincoln was poor, 
but, after all, he had enough cash in hand to 
spare the time for the debate with Douglas and 
for all the politics that followed, up to the time 

when he began to draw a salary as President. 

40 



SOME DETAILS OF LIVING 

The trouble with the chaps that come early 
into ready-made money is that so few of them 
ever learn enough about common human life, 
and people, and the elements of the job, to be 
considerably useful, even if they aspire to be. 
Still, I think they do better nowadays than they 
used to. The money-getting school, whatever 
course you take, is an exacting school. Some- 
how you have to deliver the goods — some kind 
of goods that somebody is willing to pay for. 
I wonder how much the girls miss, those of 
them who do miss it, by not taking the courses 
in that school ! Of course, they miss some great 
possibilities of development, but against that 
you have to measure what they would miss by 
not being able to do two kinds of things in the 
same years, and sacrificing what they get as it 
is, for what they might get as it might be. 
There comes in the division of work between 
men and women and the difference in their 
natural careers. Cordelia as she is, for me. 

Cordelia and I are agreed that we will have 
rhododendrons in our garden. Those in the 
Park have begun to bloom, and I am excessive- 
ly pleased wath them. They have such a fine 
Greek name that takes me back to Xenophon's 

41 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

Anabasis, and such splendid blossoms and such 
interesting shades of color, and then they bloom 
in the shade. I respect them most of all for 
that. To live in the shade and turn out so 
splendid — well, allegorically speaking, it hap- 
pens more or less to folks, too. It will cost 
us something to have a good lot of rhododen- 
drons in our garden, but when it comes to 
planning for our country place we never spare 
expense. Why should we.^^ Frugality of im- 
agination is no saving to anybody. Cordelia 
is less extravagant in that particular than I am, 
because when I see the men who earn a lot of 
money I speculate in my mind as to how they 
do it and whether I could do it, and I usually 
decide that I shall be able to presently if I have 
time, and then, naturally, I think what I shall 
have when I get all that money, and just now 
it is rhododendrons because they are just coming 
along. A good deal goes with rhododendrons: 
hired men, domestic animals, chariots of loco- 
motion; I dare say by the time Cordelia and I 
get around to have them aeroplanes will have 
become a reasonable solicitation. But there's 
no hurry. The rhododendrons in the Park are 
lovely, and I dare say there are more in the 

42 



SOME DETAILS OF LIVING 

Bronx (if you can get there), and we have hos- 
pitable friends who have them in gardens. 

This observing the money-getters and notic- 
ing how they do it, and computing how long 
it will take to learn the trick and acquire the 
necessary prestige, is all right enough and even 
useful, but it plagues me when I get my mind 
too much on it. That's not really the way to 
live — and yet, and yet. "The life is more than 
meat; the body more than raiment," but, hav- 
ing life, meat comes very handy, and having a 
body, raiment is convenient. The people who 
miss it are those who starve life, or overlook it, 
in their solicitude for meat and motors. 

The prevalent habit of going to Europe is 
curious. For that matter the habits of con- 
temporary Americans are very curious — the 
motor-car habit so conspicuous just now, their 
travel habit, much cultivated by farmers in 
winter and by city people in summer. They 
are remarkable habits; instructive, no doubt; 
expensive, but somehow at present there is 
money for them. Cordelia says she has trav- 
eled, and need not go on the road again for some 
time. I haven't, but I am content to wait 
until it is convenient. This town of New York 

43 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

is trying to live in in some ways, but it can be 
said for it that here a great many things are 
brought to the door. There are pictures here, 
and very pleasing objects in the shop windows, 
and a variety of people, and spoken languages 
enough to satisfy the most ambitious, and a 
mighty interesting assortment of architecture, 
and more making while you wait. Some Ameri- 
cans in time past have been to Europe to good 
purpose — as witness our newer architecture — 
and some keep going there to pretty good pur- 
pose every year. That makes it the easier to 
stay at home and say Coelum non animum to 
oneself, and grub along. Cordelia and I be- 
stow some of our spare attention on the growth 
of characters. They don't seem to grow so 
very much on the road. Intelligence and powers 
of comparison may get a boost in the school of 
itineracy, but character not so probably. Cor- 
lear Van Terminal has been to Europe once or 
twice every year since I can remember, and 
gads constantly when at home, and all but 
sleeps in a motor-car, and yet, so far as I can 
see, he's always just the same as he was the 
last time. I can't see that he's got ahead one 
lap. Chapman says the soul of man requires 

44 



SOME DETAILS OF LIVING 

to be fed on the Bible and the Greek poets. 
One can do that at home, and one can work at 
home, and have faith and endure and plug 
along — all quite useful to character, and as 
developing in some ways as travel and Europe 
can be in others. 

Cordelia and I have been reading about the 
Wesleys and the characters they got and how 
they got them. There were eighteen children 
or thereabouts, and a dozen or so grew up. Fine 
people, too; admirable stock and developed by 
discipline, privation, and pious training, all 
tempered by affection, humor, and lots of 
quality in the trainers. It makes you feel that 
character is a very expensive product, and 
hardly to be had at the ten-cent store where we 
and our contemporaries are prone to go for it. 

The Wesleys were poor; very much poorer 
than is thought at all suitable in these times, 
even for the reverend clergy or for the teachers 
of our youth. The father was a clergyman; 
the mother was a lady of excellent abilities and 
education, and they lived in the seventeenth 
and eighteenth centuries. Food was plain and 
hard to get in that family, and raiment was only 
slightly related to embellishment, and sickness 

45 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

was frequent and poverty perpetual; but with 
what audacity those Wesleys took hold on life! 
It makes our timid overtures look like mill- 
pond voyaging. Really it is wholesome to sit 
by the window, within ear-shot of the rattle of 
the street-cars and the chug-chug of the auto- 
mobiles, and read of the past straits of the strait- 
ened and the courage of the bold, and observe 
on what shoulders of men and women, and 
through what bogs of privation, civilization 
has come along. 

Not that the Wesleys had a preference for 
privation. The Reverend Samuel scrambled 
actively to maintain his family, but the increas- 
ing family outran his best diligence. We have 
changed all that. Families are less apt to out- 
rim the paternal diligence in these days. So 
far as numbers go, they trudge along respect- 
fully behind the census man and look over his 
shoulder at the figures. But that change is all 
in the day's work, and springs out of changed 
conditions. People in our time are not curious 
enough about the processes of nature to raise 
very large families in order that they may 
watch near at hand the workings of the rule 
about the survival of the fittest. What they 

46 



SOME DETAILS OF LIVING 

can observe of the application of that rule in 
written biography and among the neighbors 
seems to suffice, and in their own personal 
speculation they seem to care for no more 
progeny than they think they can contrive 
survival for, whether they are fittest or not. 
So butts in man, and tries to adjust the pro- 
cesses of nature to match his judgment and his 
taste in expenditure. 

When it gets hot Cordelia will be going off 
to her father's country palace in Connecticut, 
varying that experience in due time by a so- 
journ in my father's country palace in New 
Jersey, and I shall spend with her so much of 
the time as my urban duties permit. That will 
save us from dependence on any fresh-air funds 
this year. Parents are a considerable con- 
venience, especially nowadays, when so many 
of them have learned their place, and especially 
in this town of New York, where it costs all you 
can earn to provide a winter habitation, and 
where the young wives of earnest workers like 
me are apt to be a good deal out of a job in 
summer. Much more systematic provision is 
'made to carry my kind of man through the 
summer than for Cordelia's kind of woman — 

47 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

the clubs, for example. For man and wife at 
our stage of life parents, duly qualified and 
equipped, are a very suitable and timely pro- 
vision. Indeed, I feel sometimes that the 
worthlessness and miscellaneous degeneracy of 
parents in these times is exaggerated. I don't 
say this by way of casting an anchor to the 
windward, nor out of mere magnanimity, but 
because I honestly think so. People say that 
parental authority is all gone. Some think it 
good riddance; others lament. Since democ- 
racy came to be the fashion everybody wants 
his own way more than formerly, and gets it 
rather more, children included. But parental 
direction is still a factor in life, and parental 
influence is enormous, and influence gets to 
the springs of action and character even more 
effectually than dogmatic authority. It is 
much harder for a fool father to blight a Mira- 
beau nowadays, and those Wesley parents that 
I spoke of might in our time have meddled less 
with their daughters' marriages, thereby, pos- 
sibly, avoiding some disasters; for the Wesley 
girls chose ill, but their parents, in choosing for 
them, chose still worse. Parents doubtless 
realize the limitations of their calling better 

48 



SOME DETAILS OF LIVING 

than they did, and a good deal more is done in 
these days than formerly to piece out their 
deficiencies and help them with their duties. 
Doctors give them better advice than the Wes- 
ley parents got; schools in this country — in 
spite of the constant stream of criticism and 
deprecation which schools endure — average 
surely a great deal better than schools did fifty 
years ago. The raising and training of the 
young, being as important a matter as there is 
in sight, has had protracted attention from some 
of the best minds, and has had money showered 
on it in a huge profusion. All that has been 
more or less helpful to parents, but it does not 
warrant the idea, so popular among current 
commentators, that parents have come to be 
supernumeraries on the public stage. That is 
a ridiculous notion, the absurdity of which 
would be demonstrated in about half a day if 
parents universally should quit work and take 
a half-holiday. 

We ought to save a little money this summer 
living on our fathers. It is a grand way to 
save. I don't know of a better. It makes 
frugality possible without self-denial — at least 
without privation. They say there is excellent 

49 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

sport to be got out of self-denial, and I read 
that saving money and the repression of the 
impulse to spend it make like everything for 
the development of character. I dare say that 
is so. It is all a part of self-control, and of 
government by intelligence instead of by im- 
pulse. And self-control, including timely and 
suitable repression of expenditure, means free- 
dom, and power to give, and the power to do, 
and the power to jump in and seize an oppor- 
tunity. Possibly I can acquire the accomplish- 
ment of not buying some things that I want, 
even though I have the money to pay for them. 
That will be a wonderful acquisition to me, 
though I have got so far as to be mighty par- 
ticular about what I buy on credit. One has 
got to get as far as that if he is going to get 
married on such an income as ours. 

That was a great stroke — ^getting married. 
I don't see how I had the nerve to do it. Prob- 
ably I hadn't. I dare say we got married on 
Cordelia's nerve, for when you come down to 
the facts it was she who took most of the 
chances, and really made the choice. To choose 
and to decide things seem in our day to be very 
largely women's work. I am more and more 

50 



SOME DETAILS OF LIVING 

impressed with that as I go more and more to 
Cordeha to get her views. I get them on pretty 
much everything except points of law. I am 
the speciahst on that and on the earning of 
money, but she is the speciahst on the arrange- 
ment of hfe. I guess she is an obedient wife, 
but in practice I seem to make suggestions and 
she to make decisions. She makes them with 
great consideration and indulgence for me, and 
with a degree of judgment that saves me much 
mental effort. The opportunities of mental 
effort that I enjoy below Canal Street, between 
ten o'clock and six, suffice to keep my mind 
exercised, and I am no glutton about making 
unnecessary mental efforts after I get uptown. 
Perhaps that simplifies life for Cordelia. I 
wonder what women do whose husbands don't 
have to work! 



Ill 

COMMODITIES AND CONTENTMENT 

WE have been out to Orange County to 
spend a week-end with the Peytons. 
They are about our age, but differ from us in con- 
dition in that they have adequate means of sup- 
port. Archie Peyton got them by inheritance, 
and they are very ample and enable Archie and 
Eleanor to have all the desirable things and do 
everything they want to. They try conscien- 
tiously to live up to their opportunities, making 
pretty hard work of it, but that's natural, for 
it is hard work. They went abroad in the 
summer, and now they are providing country 
lodging and food and sport for their available 
friends. This sport is golf and tennis and road 
exercises, relieved by dabs of riding after 
hounds, for the Orange County Hunt meets 
out in their country. Eleanor says it's nice, 
except that they have to invite too many peo- 
ple who have had too much to eat and are 

52 



COMMODITIES AND CONTENTMENT 

trying to get thin, whereas it would be more 
satisfactory to be inviting people who have 
had too little to eat and were trying to get fat. 
That's not why they asked us, for we had 
been living on our parents all summer and were 
quite plump. They have got motor-cars, horses, 
butlers, valets, chrysanthemums, greenhouses, 
and all the apparatus of pride. For us on sixty 
dollars a week it is rather expensive even to 
nibble at it. We can't do it often, but we saved 
money living on our parents, and the fall is 
a grand season, and to fill one's lungs with the 
air of it and one's vision with autumn colors is 
worth some fiscal strain, and it always does me 
good, too, spiritually even more than physically, 
to get over a little easy country on a horse. 
Besides, Archie is my client, and that's im- 
portant. I have discovered that one of the 
great secrets of prosperity and advancement 
in this w^orld, especially in the profession that 
I affect, is to have one's coevals grow up and 
prosper and have business, especially law busi- 
ness, that somebody must be paid to do. When 
people have these opportunities of lawful gain 
to bestow they seem to like to bestow them on 

habitual friends, provided that they have any 

53 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

and can persuade themselves that they are 
competent. A great deal of opportunity goes 
by association — is bound to. 

To be honest, I did not make all these dis- 
coveries solely on my own hook. Though they 
are simple enough. Major Brace expounded 
some of them to me after dinner. He gave me 
great encouragement in the effort to exist. 
Promotion, he said, cometh neither from the 
East nor the West, but from the cemetery, so 
it was almost sure to come to any one that 
could hold out; and in the long run a man who 
was sober, competent and diligent, and in- 
telligent about his associations couldn't very 
well miss it. There were so many advantageous 
jobs to distribute and each generation had them 
in turn, as the world and what is in it came to 
be its property. Moreover, as things go now 
and with us, each generation has a lot more 
things and opportunities and good employ- 
ments than the generation that preceded it, 
not only absolutely, but per capita, because the 
increase of wealth and business is outrunning the 
increase of population. It wasn't a scramble, 
the Major insisted, for a share in a limited 
quantity of goods, but for an unlimited quantity, 

54 



COMMODITIES AND CONTENTMENT 

and the harder the scramble the more there was 
to distribute. 

All that came out of a discussion whether 
we should restrict our wants or try to satisfy 
them. Try to satisfy them, the Major said. 
Effort in that direction enriches and develops 
civilization. It tends to increase the supply of 
commodities. It is not the satisfied people, 
nor the people who are content to go without, 
that make civilization go forward, but the un- 
satisfied ones, who want a lot of things they 
have not got, and get out and go after them 
and build railroads and factories and improve 
agriculture and invent machinery and multiply 
automobiles and take an interest in aeroplanes 
and try to accumulate money and keep it em- 
ployed. 

"Are you doing all those things. Major?" 
said I. 

"Me.^ Oh no! I belong to the police. My 
job is to help to keep order and protect property. 
I never had one of the large-sized appetites for 
commodities — just food, clothes, shelter, money 
in the bank, and something to give away, and 
protection against rainy days, and enough to 
keep my wife and children off the Charity 

5 55 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

Organization when I get run over by a motor- 
car — that's all I want. You see, I'm a lazy 
man and like to read the newspaper and invite 
my soul, and everything I can't get by working 
five or six hours a day I go without. Don't 
take me for a pattern. I haven't got the prog- 
ress of civilization really at heart." 

"The express-drivers help it on, I suppose. 
Major, when they strike for more pay?" They 
were striking at that time. 

"No doubt. All that should help distribu- 
tion, provided the funds they are all striking 
to share exist in sufficient quantity. Distri- 
bution is next in importance to production. 
You've got to have something to distribute, 
and strikes are not immediately helpful to pro- 
duction, as you may have noticed, but the 
organization of labor ought to be helpful to 
distribution. Only nowadays when an im- 
portant strike is won the cost of it is immediate- 
ly shifted onto the general public by a gentle 
elevation of prices." 

The Major is a lawyer and practises con- 
siderably as a trustee, and is doubtless more 
concerned with the philosophy of business than 
if his energies were enlisted in selling goods and 

56 



COMMODITIES AND CONTENTMENT 

wresting a profit out of it. "Mankind can be 
eased considerably in this earthly competition," 
he went on, "by great increases of production, 
great extensions of agriculture and manufactur- 
ing and transportation, and great economies in 
all of them, provided that distribution fairly 
keeps pace with production." It comes nearer 
to doing so, he thought, than all the exhorters 
and socialist people admit, because products 
have to find a market; but when it comes to 
that, this is a fairly roomy world, with many 
mouths and backs in it, and transportation is 
cheap and markets are world-wide, and goods 
as yet don't necessarily pile up on any of us 
because there are a lot of them produced. 

And so the Major argued in effect that one 
way to help bring on the millennium was to 
increase the production and distribution of 
commodities. I suppose that is one way. 
There must be some connection between the 
millennium and civilization. The millennium 
isn't going to swoop down on a world that has 
no meat in the house and where half the people 
live in trees. It is true that it was not a lack 
of commodities that drove Eve to eat the apple 
and brought on working for a living, and most 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

of us realize that man cannot live by bread 
alone, and that with binsful of commodities 
on every comer free for the taking the world 
would not be saved nor the folks in it satisfied 
and happy. What an interesting simplification 
of wants would happen in that case, and how 
quickly people would come to ascertain what 
they really needed and refuse to be loaded up 
with anything else! Still, there is a connection 
between human progress and wants and the 
commodities that appease them. A mission- 
ary's daughter told me once about her father's 
experience with the South- African blacks. Now 
and then he would make a convert, and always, 
if it was a thorough job, the convert would be- 
gin to reach out after civilization — some clothes, 
a bigger dwelling — ^presently, I dare say, a top- 
hat. It wasn't all mere acquisitiveness, either, 
for some of the incidents of conversion were in- 
convenient, especially the troublesome domestic 
readjustment called for by the theory of the 
suflSciency of one wife. Of course, the millen- 
nium may swoop down and find us running 
about in skins or less, and living on roots, but 
I bet it won't. It is much more likely to be 
welcomed by flocks of aeroplanes to an enor- 

58 



COMMODITIES AND CONTENTMENT 

mously productive earth, worked for all it is 
worth by people intelligent enough to have 
aboHshed poverty and solved the problem of 
distribution. 

What does man want here below, anyway? 
Room and bath, food, clothes, a newspaper, 
and a job and fair opportunities to better him- 
self. He has got the newspaper already. In 
this country, at least, there are enough news- 
papers to go around, and in the cities any one 
who declines to buy one can supply himself out 
of the first ash barrel. There is nothing so 
cheap as newspapers, and that is a consequence 
of the pressure of commodities on the market. 
The advertiser pays all but a cent's worth of 
the cost of the newspaper, and would gladly 
pay that, no doubt, but for the fear of arousing 
the reader's suspicions. How much this has 
to do with the fact that I hear of likely young 
men who come out of the nurseries of learning 
and look wistfully at the newspapers and fail 
to see attractive jobs on them and go away 
and do something else, I don't know. It may be 
that likely young men never did troop in large 
swarms into newspapering. Banking usually 
looks better to them, because men get rich at 

59 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

it, and law because a knowledge of it is no 
hindrance in any calling. 

The supply of rooms and baths is not so near- 
ly equal to human needs as the supply of news- 
papers, but it is gaining on the population. 
Out there at the Peytons' house, for example, 
it has caught up. In all the newer country 
houses hereabouts the great architectural fea- 
ture is room and bath. In a Long Island house 
just completed that I inspected last spring 
before the family moved in there were between 
twenty and twenty -five bathrooms. There 
were three in the family, with a liability to 
guests if the owner's wife ever succeeded in 
getting rested. I thought this marked a con- 
siderable forward stride in civilization. Church 
unity still hangs back a bit, but we are getting 
pretty strong on plumbing, and the millennium 
may find us with a bath apiece. 

The Peytons hadn't so many bathrooms, 
because their house was not so large as the 
Long Island house, and they had to save part 
of it for clothed appearances; but they had 
many, and Cordelia and I admired them very 
much. Living in a six-hundred-dollar New 

York flat makes marvelously for the apprecia- 

00 



COMMODITIES AND CONTENTMENT 

tion of space, light, air, and running water. 
Of course the Peytons' country house had all 
these blessings, and, besides, was delightfully 
fresh and clean and embellished with very 
pleasing adornments. "No doubt, Cordelia," 
said I, "you might have had a set of things like 
this if you had shown a little timely judgment." 
"Possibly;" said Cordelia; "this is a nice set, 
too. How many bathrooms shall we need. 
Peregrine?" 

"One — two — four — six; six will do us, I 
think, with a little management and a few 
extra sets of bath-robes and slippers. We 
don't want to keep a plumber. To have more 
than a dozen makes a home too much like a 
hotel." 

But there are a number of things that we 
shall want before we have even one house with 
even six bathrooms in it. I do not greatly 
covet a superfluity of bathrooms, though 
enough of them is one of the great luxuries of 
our time. Hot water is one of the leading 
valuables of life — one of the things that help 
to reconcile humanity to civilization and to 
offset its interference with such privileges as 
living out-of-doors and not having newspapers. 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

That has long been appreciated. I believe the 
Greeks liked hot water and made provision to 
have it. Certainly the Romans liked it and 
went in strong for baths. The English have 
liked it and had it in fair quantity, along with 
daily deluges of cold water. We Americans 
delight in it and have more of it already, I 
suppose, than any people ever had before, and 
our supply is constantly increasing and con- 
stantly spreading from the cities to the country. 
It is cheap, as things go, and there is fair pros- 
pect that there will eventually be enough to 
go around. To have a universal supply of hot 
water and newspapers and a long start toward 
a universal supply of what we call education is 
doing not so ill as things go. I can wait for the 
six bathrooms, or even three. We have one 
now. One is a great blessing. I suppose it is 
our egotism that makes us more or less indiffer- 
ent to what is not ours and cannot be for the 
present. What most of us want is the next 
thing — the thing almost within our reach. We 
don't think about the things that are altogether 
beyond the scope of our fortunes. We do not 
covet them, nor are we jealous of our neighbors 
who have them, unless we conclude tb*^ we 

62 



COMMODITIES AND CONTENTMENT 

have too little because they have too much. 
If the competition seems to us fair, we rather 
like to see prizes go to those who can win them, 
for a life with prizes in it for winners, even 
material prizes, looks richer and more attrac- 
tive to most of us than a life planned on the 
principle of a division of the gate money among 
all who come in. 

Do you notice how strong the propensity is 
among all the fairly comfortable people to con- 
sider their own condition and their own stand- 
ards as normal and truly desirable, and those 
of other folks, whether they have more or less, 
as a little olff? I think that propensity is a 
wonderful provision for human happiness. 
We value, as a rule, what seems the best thing 
obtainable for ourselves. Whether it is abun- 
dance or a stimulating degree of privation, we 
incline to think it is a good thing for us and a 
better thing than other people have who have 
something different. 

"Cordelia," said I, while we were talking 
about the bathroom, "you might have got a 
better set of things with some other man, but 
he would not have the experience or the dis- 
cipline^ that I shall have by the time I have ac- 
es 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

quired the set of things that you ought event- 
ually to get with 7?i€." There you are! We 
think we're better off than the Peytons because 
we haven't got so much as they have, and better 
off than the Goves because we've got more 
(mostly prospective) than they have. We are 
the standard. We laugh at ourselves, but sure- 
ly it's a fine thing to have so strong a bent tow- 
ard toleration of things as they are, and ex- 
pectation of being pleased with them as they're 
going to be. I suppose it is just a different 
form of this same self-satisfaction that makes 
the teetotalers want to vote away everybody's 
grog, and the college authorities insist that all 
the boys shall want to be high scholars like 
themselves, and the appeased women deprecate 
the agitations of the unappeased for woman's 
suffrage. 

Probably Cordelia and I are exceptionally 
resigned to our condition ; more so than the aver- 
age of mankind. Yes, I suspect that is so, but 
I suspect also that it is only a provisional resig- 
nation. We reached out and got the next 
thing — each other. That was highly satis- 
factory and a good deal better than if we had 
waited for something else. But this reaching 

64 



COMMODITIES AND CONTENTMENT 

out for the next thing seems to be a continuing 

process, and I suspect it has to go on till 

stopping-time, and that satisfaction in life is 

pretty closely geared to the ability to maintain 

it effectively. That is not altogether a soothing 

reflection, but I don't know that it is desirable 

that all reflections should be soothing. A fair 

proportion of them ought to be stimulating. 

I observe that I read the writings of the eflScient 

when my energies are high, and when they are 

low find solace in those of the lazy — only they 

must not be too lazy to write. Some of the very 

best writers were lazy, and struggled with it. 

Maybe it's hard work to be a writer, but then 

it's hard work to be much of anything. But 

that's nothing! Nobody wastes sympathy, or 

ought to, on hard workers, provided they get 

in fair measure what they go out after. And 

one of the greatest things they get is increased 

ability to work hard. This is not entirely my 

discovery. It was suggested by an aged friend, 

but as far as I have experimented with it I 

think it is so. Of course, the suggestion was 

accompanied by a reminder in quotation-marks 

that life would be endurable except for its 

pleasures, but that's not to be accepted too 

e5 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

confidently. It depends on the pleasures and 
whether they please or not. There are a lot 
of things that are labeled "pleasure," and most 
of them are price-marked in more or less for- 
bidding figures, but the considerable satisfac- 
tions of life seem to be conditions of the mind 
which may be related to living conditions that 
cost money, but which are not themselves price- 
marked in figures that are at all plain. There's 
polo, a good, lively pleasure and fairly high- 
priced and consumptive also of time, but I 
judge the main value of active sports of that 
sort to aspiring men is indirect. They contrib- 
ute to a physical efficiency which is useful just 
so far as it promotes mental efficiency — sanity 
and activity of mind, spontaneity of thought 
and speech and power. No doubt for some 
men sports are a form of discipline. They train 
some spirits to exertion, and make for energy 
and supply driving force for work, but, dear me, 
they take a lot of time and tend to consume 
more energy than they furnish. They are fine 
for boys, soldiers, Englishmen, and people with 
a disposition to grow fat, and an excellent vaca- 
tion employment for some people, but I suspect 
there is an economic warrant for the disposition 

66 



COMMODITIES AND CONTENTMENT 

of the common run of American adults to in- 
trust the transaction of their active sports to 
persons who can give their whole time to them, 
and whose skilful exertions it is restful now and 
then to watch. 

I remember my classmate Hollaway saying 
one day of a group of sporty young gentlemen 
whom we were discussing, "The things that 
seem to amuse them would not give me pleas- 
ure." That was true. Hollaway liked to 
think. That was the way he had most of his 
fun. He was willing to put in enough physical 
exertion to make his machinery run smoothly, 
and liked, as a rule, to do it quickly and have 
it over, but he got his fun out of what went on 
in his head, and in talk. He practised and en- 
joyed all the mental processes, observation, 
cogitation, consideration, reflection, rumination, 
imagination, and the rest, with resulting and 
accompanying discourse. Nobody around had 
more fun than Hollaway. Somebody said he 
had a "happy activity of the soul." Maybe 
that is out of Emerson. I'll ask Cordelia, who 
confesses to some acquaintance with Emerson. 
But, anyhow, the happy activity of the soul 
is good to have and not visibly price-marked 

67 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

nor denied necessarily, like the opera and polo, 
to the impecunious. 

Going out to visit the Peytons was an en- 
livening change, and gave us new topics for 
discourse and reflection, but the best of it was 
to talk about it with Cordelia. I like the 
tranquillity of being married — married, that is, 
to Cordelia. Visiting the Peytons is a bit of 
embroidery on the fabric of life, but coming 
home to the flat and staying in all the evening 
and reading as many of the contemporary 
periodicals as I can manage to get hold of and 
get time to explore, and talking to Cordelia — 
that is the very web of life. I seldom have the 
sense of justification in life so strongly as in 
these domesticated discourses with Cordelia. 
I have got her to reading the contemporary 
periodicals and the newspapers and keeping 
some track of what is going on in the world. 
I don't know what kind of radicals we will turn 
out to be if we keep our minds on that diet. 
But I get the other point of view down-town, 
where my employment is largely to assist my 
boss to help gentlemen with property to adjust 
the management of their concerns to laws con- 
trived with intent to retard their processes of 

68 



COMMODITIES AND CONTENTMENT 

acquisition. It is nip and tuck in these days 
between the gentlemen who make the progres- 
sive poHtical periodicals and the gentlemen 
who control the railroads and banks and trusts 
and their employees, to determine who is going 
to run the country. As things are, the country 
is run, after a fashion. The wheels do turn, and 
production and distribution are accomplished. 
To be sure, the wheels screech more or less, and 
the production is pretty wasteful compared with 
what the professional economists say it might 
be, and the stream of distribution runs so lumpy 
that it makes you laugh; but a fair proportion 
of the Lord's will seems to be done, and hopeful 
people calculate that the proportion is increas- 
ing, though you might not always think so to 
read the progressive periodicals. A large part 
of the happy activity of nature consists of the 
big creatures eating the little ones, but we 
complain awfully about it when we think we 
see it going on in human society, and the law, 
whose humble but aspiring servant I am, was 
invented to check it. Everything that is in- 
vented to check that propensity tends to develop 
an appetite of its own. The law, the church, 
the walking delegate, all have in them the in- 

69 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

gredients of voracity, and I dare say the same 
ingredients are latent in the progressive periodi- 
cals. Who has the brains to govern will gov- 
ern, and the mere substitution of lean masters 
for fat ones is not necessarily an advantage. I 
suppose it is largely our own consciousness of 
that that restrains us from taking the country 
away from the interests and giving it to the 
periodicals; and besides, of course, it is harder, 
because the interests hang on so to what is 
theirs, and the law, which is me, finds so many 
obstacles to detaching them. 

Well, practising law all day below Canal 
Street in the interest of the interests, and read- 
ing the progressive periodicals all the evening 
— there's such a raft of them — in the interest of 
righteousness, altruism, and the people, ought 
to make me a very broad-minded person — so 
broad-minded probably that I shall lose sense 
of direction and fetch up in the driver's place 
on a Brooklyn street-car. 

And yet probably not, with Cordelia as a 
partner. I have consulted her about going to 
the Assembly. Not that anybody wants me 
to go there, but it looks interesting. I wish my 
boss would employ me to go there and see that 

70 



COMMODITIES AND CONTENTMENT 

I did not starve. But he couldn't very well. 
I would be a legislator in the employ of an 
employee of the interests, and all the fun would 
be gone. Father and Father-in-law might fi- 
nance me, but neither of them is that much of 
a patriot. If I were employed by one of the 
periodicals there would be less scandal in that, 
but that's not a practical thought. I dare say 
that I shall have to make considerably more 
progress in the practice of my profession before 
I can go to Albany, and by that time I shall 
have become too valuable to myself and de- 
pendent associates to be spared to go there. 
After all, I got married, and I suppose that is 
as fatal an indiscretion as a person of my at- 
tenuated means should permit himself at this 
stage of his endeavors. It is about politics 
very much as it is about getting married — if 
you wait till you're ready, you can't. It seems 
as if everything had to be shot on the wing. 
We ought to be governed by people of inde- 
pendent means. They are the only people who 
can afford the employment. But most people 
who have independent means have a point of 
view to match, and there you are — it isn't quite 
the point of view of a large proportion of the 

6 71 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBiVND 

governed. Just so contradictory things are, 
and yet, after all, it's that that makes the 
game. 

My, my! We have been married nearly a 
year, and have not yet repented. Our cir- 
cumstances improve a little from month to 
month. Besides The Firm's regular contri- 
bution to my maintenance, I pick up odd jobs 
now and then on my own account. Father and 
Father-in-law take occasional chances in the 
lottery of my accomplishments by sending me 
bits of business, and I pick up other bits from 
other people. I have even made literary com- 
positions, and tried, not always fruitlessly, to 
sell them. That is a good enough game, if one 
dared give himself to it, but, except as com- 
pounded with politics, economics, or public 
service of some sort, it leads away from law, 
so I don't follow it hard. 



IV 

THE BABY 

UNDOUBTEDLY the baby makes a great 
difference. He fills up the flat, for one 
thing. I foresee that he will turn us out of it. 
Nevertheless he is valuable, and probably worth 
his space even in New York. His name is 
Samuel French. Cordelia named him after 
her father. She is extremely pleased with him. 
So is Matilda Finn, so is my mother, so is my 
mother-in-law. Even the trained assistant to 
nature who was here to welcome him seemed 
very pleased to meet Samuel, and both his 
grandfathers have been around to inspect him, 
and have approved and duly benef acted him. 
Neither of these aged but still profitable men 
has had a grandchild before, and they seem to 
like it. As for me, naturally I am like to burst 
with the pride at being associated, however 
humbly, with an achievement so important. 

73 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

Father-in-law is building a new room on to his 
summer palace in Connecticut, with a view, I 
think, to the more convenient entertainment 
of his new descendant, and I think that noth- 
ing but consideration for my fiscal incapacity 
withholds him from building Cordelia a country 
house. By various expedients I have swelled 
our sixty dollars a week to about seventy, 
which is a grateful gain, and appreciable in 
spite of the demands of the Post-office, the 
public transportation companies, the market- 
men, and the other agencies of depletion, so 
corroding to the fiscal being; but even — let 
me see, seven times fifty-two weeks — ^but even 
$3,640 is not an annual income that seems equal 
to the maintenance of two residences. I guess 
if we are to have a suburban home it must be 
an all-the-year-round home for the present, 
and father-in-law's place in Connecticut is not 
just the right place for that. It is some miles 
from the station, and involves maintenance of 
horsepower of some sort, and of course that is 
unspeakable except as father-in-law provides 
it. Our lay would be a villa about the length 
of a baseball ground from the station, or, 
better still, something five cents from Wall 

74 



THE BABY 

Street by tunnel or trolley, and you catch the 
car on the next corner. 

But think of the crowd on the car! 

No, I won't think of it. It is the common 
lot hereabouts, and I should be able to stand 
my share of it, which I would not get in full, 
anyhow, because, being a lawyer, I can leave 
home a little later, and leave for home usually 
a little earlier or later than the great body of 
the workers for a living. 

My new responsibility has brought me a 
variety of new appreciations. As a parent I 
find I have new sentiments about parents, and 
increased esteem and regard for them as pillars 
that uphold life and direct it. Beyond doubt, 
they are fine for upholding grandchildren. No 
doubt there would be considerably more grand- 
children in our world if there were more grand- 
parents who recognized their responsibilities 
and made provision, as a matter of course, to 
meet them. But that does not accord with the 
lively individualism of our generation. Not 
only are we all desirous of independent life, but 
our parents prefer it for us. Accordingly, when 
we get above the social plane in which inde- 
pendent life for man and wife can be main- 

75 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

tained for twenty dollars a week, marriage is 
apt to come late. There are immense advan- 
tages about that social plane in which twenty 
dollars a week is a complete living, and the wife 
is cook and housemaid, wife, mother, and nurse 
all in one, and the state provides education, and 
the doctor adjusts his charges to your income, 
and all the man has to look after is food, clothes, 
shelter, and pocket money! I hope the people 
who are born with a call on that phase of exist- 
ence appreciate their luck. To rise to the 
twenty-dollar-a-week phase must be full of 
satisfactions, but to drop to it is quite another 
matter. Whatever starting-point is dealt out 
to us, it is from that point that we have to go 
on, and, whether we like it or not, the point 
at which it behooves us to arrive is measured 
from the point at which we start. 

Raising babies must have been very much 
simplified by the invention of the kodak. There 
is no attitude, expression, sentiment, costume, 
or absence of costume of Samuel that this handy 
little instrument has not perpetuated. And 
inasmuch as Samuel varies and progresses from 
hour to hour, acquiring personality, weight, and 
accomplishments, changing in his features and 

76 



THE BABY 

developing new resemblances, the click of the 
kodak is almost as frequent in our flat as the 
whir of the sewing-machine. When infants 
had to run to the photographer's for every new 
picture, I don't see how they got their natural 
rest. You know they sleep about eighteen 
hours a day. One would think that with all 
that somnolence a baby would be no more 
trouble than a dormouse, but Samuel is almost 
a complete occupation. As an example of 
woman's work he qualifies by being never done. 
When he is asleep he is about to waken, and 
when he is awake he is about to sleep, and either 
way he is either taking nourishment or about to 
take it, or taking a bath, or changing his clothes, 
or acquiring ideas, or taking first lessons in lan- 
guage. Since I have known him I sympathize 
with the woman who thought it just as easy 
to raise six children as one, because one took 
up all your time, and six couldn't do more. 

I never saw Cordelia so much amused with 
anything, and I admit to being, myself, more 
diverted and entertained than I should have 
thought possible. I had a puppy once that was 
a delight, so cheerful, so prodigal of affection- 
ate welcomes, and so incessant in his activities. 

77 



\ 

I 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

Mother has got him now. She appropriated 
him — or he her — and kept him, she said, to 
remind her of me. But Samuel beats the 
puppy. He does not get around as briskly yet 
as the puppy did, but he has the same delight 
in very simple toys, and a similar livelmess of 
mind, and a like capacity to be pleased. He is 
quite a lot like that puppy as he was when I 
first got him. 

I didn't need anything to increase my in- 
terest in getting home at night. Cordelia at- 
tended to that. But Samuel has increased it. 
He is awake when I get home, and, though he 
is usually getting ready to go to bed, he always 
expresses a flattering satisfaction at meeting 
me again, and has interesting details of progress 
to report, and smiles, and puts out arms, and 
makes inarticulate noises, and sits in my lap, 
and makes an inventory of my accessible 
properties. 

And, of course, there is a great deal to be 
told about him, including the day's report of 
what has been said of him by admiring friends, 
and of the visits he has made and received, 
and, now and then, statistics of his weight and 
progress in intelligence and activity. I think 

78 



THE BABY 

Cordelia talks to Matilda Finn and her various 
visitors about him all day, and then to me 
about him most of the evening. It is surprising 
that so small a carcass should afford so much 
discourse. 

We have entered him at a suitable school, 
which is perhaps another token of the incom- 
pleteness of my emancipation. You know 
that for some years past some of the boarding- 
schools have been so highly esteemed, for one 
reason or another, by unemancipated parents 
that they have coveted the privilege of having 
their sons go to them, and, to insure getting it, 
have entered their boys' names at those schools 
as soon as they were born. So I entered Samuel 
at the school where I went myself. If that 
implied incompleteness of emancipation in me, 
I don't care. Samuel must have his chance. 
It is enough for me to be emancipated. Eman- 
cipation is a personal affair, like conversion, 
and no one ought to try to force his emancipa- 
tion on any one else, least of all a parent on a 
child. Samuel may prefer the old order, and 
by the time he grows up we may have the 
wherewithal to enable him to experiment with 
it if there is any of it left. I don't know that 

79 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

there will be, and, to be sure, when did life 
offer a bigger or more uncertain speculation 
than this that Samuel yawns and gapes in the 
face of? Perhaps I ought not to call it un- 
certain, except as to times and means and de- 
tails, but that's enough; and as to those the 
uncertainty is ample. The great task that is 
doing now seems to be the improvement of the 
common lot. No doubt that is always going 
on when civilization is in its forward moods, 
but nowadays there is uncommon urgency about 
it, and remarkable command and handling of 
the progressive forces, and apparent enfeeble- 
ment of the powers of resistance. It is very 
attractive, very hopeful, but I suppose no 
thoughtful person denies that it is possible to 
improve the common lot so much and so fast 
as to force society into the hands of a receiver. 
That is one possibility that little Samuel is up 
against, and for that matter so are his parents; 
for the receivership may come, and reorganiza- 
tion after it, before Samuel is old enough to sit 
into the game. 

My! my! what will you see, little son? All 
the women voting, all the trades-unions joined 
under a single head, armies abolished, the im- 

80 



THE BABY 

mediate will of majorities the supreme and only 
law, detachable marriage, detachable judges, 
detachable constitutions? 

You may, you may ; and so may your parents, 
for that matter, and are as likely to, perhaps, 
as you are. But stay with us, none the less. 
There seems always to be good sport in this 
world for good sports — no matter what may 
be going on. Folks lived, and liked to live, 
hereabouts when the men walked between 
plow-handles with a rifle across their shoulders, 
and they can stand considerable variations in 
public habits without losing the appetite for 
life. An unchanging order is bound to grow 
tiresome, always did, always will; though out- 
side of China it is hard to find one, and even 
there the old order is moving now. We must try 
to make a good sport of Samuel; one who will 
be interested in life no matter what, and, when 
new rules are making, have a say about them. 

I don't see why I hang back so about votes 
for women. At times I think I am not op- 
posed. I think I don't care. But I read all 
the opposed discourse that has any sense in it 
with sympathy, and all the pro discourse in a 
critical spirit, rejoicing when it seems to me 

81 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

unsound. It is true enough that there is no 
compeHing reason why I should want votes 
for women. My proprietors don't want them. 
Mother sniffs at them. Cordelia is observant, 
with very much such an instinctive leaning 
toward the antis as I have. Why should I 
excite myself about "equal suffrage" when my 
ladies like things better as they are? /"'^^n't 
mother and Cordelia representative women? 
A great deal more so, I think, than most of the 
suffragists. The mass of women hereabouts 
don't seem to be concerned about voting. The 
suffragists in agitating to make them concerned 
seem to be trying to create an artificial want. 
They go about to persuade women that they 
are oppressed, and are rated politically with in- 
sane persons, criminals, and aliens. 

Now, what is all that? Is it progress, or is 
it mischief? Is it based on a mistaken concep- 
tion of women's job, or is it a natural detail of 
the redistribution of powers and privileges that 
appears to be going on? Am I opposed because 
I am a pig and a stand-patter and an old fogy? 
Are votes worth so much fuss, anyhow, and is 
it going to make any vital difference whether 
American women have them or not? 

82 



THE BABY 

I don't know that it is. The women and the 
men are so inextricably bound together that it 
is inconceivable that with woman suffrage the 
vote should divide in proportions materially 
different from what happens now. But that's 
not a reason for letting suffrage come. I do 
think that at present men and women do not 
long work together on the same level at the 
same tasks. Where women come in either 
they work under the direction of men or the 
men go out. The departments of life in which 
they rule — and there are plenty of them — are 
those in which men do not compete. I don't 
think they can compete with men as voters or 
as organizers and directors of political govern- 
ment. If the suffragists get their votes for 
women, they will get an enlarged electorate 
controlled by men as now. And why should it 
be expected that the controlling men in that 
case will be better than they are now.^ Are 
the mass of women wiser, more honest, and bet- 
ter judges of men than the mass of men.^ I 
don't think so. I think men and women are 
just mates. There seems to be a woman to 
match every man, but different from him, and 
a man to match almost every woman. It is 

83 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

not sensible to compare a superior woman with 
an ordinary or inferior man, and point out that 
she is fitter to vote than he is. Of course she 
is, but that does not touch the real question, 
which is whether government will be better 
conducted with votes for all women than it is 
now. 

Those agitators talk about the "injustice" 
of depriving women of the ballot. They might 
as well talk of the injustice of the refusal of 
water to run uphill. There's no injustice about 
it. It is nature. If it can be bettered, all right. 
Water will run uphill if there is enough pressure 
behind it. But if injustice has been done 
woman about her vote, it was done when she 
was born female and not male, and the appeal 
from that lies to the higher court. 

Was there any done.^^ Take it by and large, 
is it a misfortune to born a girl and not a boy? 
That may happen to any of us any time we 
happen to be bom. It's a toss-up. It's not 
the slightest credit to us to be born male, and 
certainly it should not be the slightest discredit 
to us to be born female; but according as we 
are born male or female we are born to different 
duties. If political government is one of the 

84 



THE BABY 

male duties, civilization will not get ahead by 
having men loosen their hold on it. For my 
part I suppose that down in the intricacies of 
my composition I have an instinctive convic- 
tion, or hunch, that political government is a 
male attribute, and that out of that comes my 
objection to abdicate, or even dilute, my share 
of it. Instinctive convictions have great weight 
in these matters, though the surface arguments 
they put out may be inadequate or mistaken, 
as the anti-suffrage arguments are so apt to be. 
The suffragist expounders demolish them, and 
think that they have accomplished something; 
but, alas! the demolition of puerile arguments 
leaves the question just where it was, with the 
pith of it still untouched. Still I think the 
agitation does good, bothering people like me, 
and making us think; asking us. What does be- 
long to women, then, if not votes .^^ How else 
are you going to give them equal life.^^ What 
does justice demand for them if not the suffrage .^^ 
If the males since the beginning of time have 
overestimated their importance and erred in 
regarding themselves as specialists in govern- 
ment, then it is only a matter of time when we 
shall be disabused of that error and shaken 

85 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

down into our rightful places. But if govern- 
ment — meaning political government rather 
than domestic — really prospers better in the 
long run in the hands of males, in their hands 
it is likely to stay — the substance of it certainly, 
however that shadow we call a vote may flutter 
off, and wherever it may alight. 

Nothing happens without a cause. If the 
men are to be abased, doubtless it will be for 
their abundant sins. If they will not work as 
men should, they will lose their jobs. If they 
will not govern as men should, they will be 
governed. History is a record of the strong 
races subduing the weak, and the wise the fool- 
ish, to the end that strength and wisdom shall 
prevail in human affairs. In these days of 
Monroe doctrines and alliances and arbitration 
treaties those harsh processes seem to have 
been superseded. Is this invasion by women 
of the province of men a new expedient of 
Nature to preserve the competition that is 
essential to human progress.'^ 

We cannot beat Nature. She is obdurate, 
resourceful, impossible to fool, with a trick to 
meet every trick that is offered her. She seems 
determined that man shall come to something 

86 



THE BABY 

and plays man against man to make him better 
himself, and is probably equal, if occasion de- 
mands it, to play one half of him against the 
other. For of course that is what woman is — 
the other half of man. There cannot be a real 
competition between the two halves, for they 
are inseparably joined and have to pull each 
other along. But for all that, they are distinct 
individuals, and one in a given period may 
make faster progress than the other, with a 
good deal of disturbance of relations and equities 
and ideas. What man gets, woman gets; what 
woman gets, man gets. When woman gets 
education, liberty, opportunity, protection, the 
whole race gets those benefits. 

Then shall we say that when woman gets the 
vote the race is that much ahead .^ It may be, 
but to me it has not been so revealed up to 
these presents. Who gave man strength gave 
him dominion. If he loses dominion it will be 
because he has either misused his strength or 
lost it. 

Samuel has not lost his. He is truly a great 

power. As I have said, he is almost a complete 

occupation for his mother, and a profitable, 

satisfying occupation, too. I confess to fears 

7 87 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

in time past that girls of Cordelia's sort did 
not have enough to do to bring them their 
proper growth and keep them happy. If they 
didn't go to college and didn't marry as soon 
as they got out of school, they seemed to drift 
into a lot of occupations that looked rather 
futile, and like a mere provision for killing time. 
They played around, they visited, they dabbled 
in anything that came handy — dances, charities, 
house-parties, art, music, extra improvements 
for the mind — anything that could be cast into 
a void of time which should have ached, and 
doubtless did. It used to make me sorry for 
the girls because it seemed so hard for them to 
buckle down to anything remunerative and 
continuous and really get ahead in it. If they 
did that, they forfeited too many opportunities 
of the leisure class, to which it seems to be in- 
tended that the daughters of the well-to-do, 
from nineteen to about twenty-three, shall be- 
long. If they went to college, that solved the 
problem for those years, but it came back at 
them as soon as they came out. If they were 
satisfied with their indefinite employments it 
was bad, and if they were not it was also bad. 
So I used to feel sorry for the girls because 

88 



THE BABY 

their job looked to me so vague, and their 
employments so fragmentary and unprom- 
ising. 

I dare say I was wrong, and that the girls 
were working more hours at their proper voca- 
tion than I had the wit to recognize. I see it 
more clearly now; that there are fruits that 
ripen best in the sun, and should not be hurried 
in the process; that Cordelia did not really 
waste those years in which she waited for me 
to get started as a wage-earner, but learned in 
them a kind of patience and useful domestica- 
tion, besides other accomplishments that make 
her better to live with now. 

Major Brace has paid us the compliment 
to look in and inspect Samuel. He q^ressed 
himself as pleased with him, and was very 
gratifying in the warmth of his congratulations 
to Cordelia and me. Speaking as a father of 
almost complete experience, he told me of the 
special enthusiasm he felt for a child that had 
never run up a dentist's bill. Samuel hasn't. 
There is little or nothing about him as yet that 
would interest a dentist; but Cordelia, whose 
forefinger is a good deal in his mouth, says 
there may be any minute. 

89 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

I must ask mother if that is so. No doubt 
Cordelia's enthusiasm is liable to mislead her. 

I believe Cordelia dislikes to spend money. 
I find her perpetually weighing something that 
might be had against its price, and deciding not 
to have it. Unless the purchasable object is 
indispensable or very positively desirable—like 
a kodak to snap at Samuel — the money looks 
better to her. That's remarkable, isn't it.^^ 
People differ in temperament as well as in 
training about that, inheriting tighter or looser 
fists, I suppose, according to the forebear they 
individually trace back to. To me, now, things 
that I want always look better than what money 
I have. It makes me unhappy to spend much 
more than I have, but I enjoy very much 
spending what I have got. I never have any 
money ahead, unless you can see savings in 
life insurance, to which I make some inade- 
quate pretense. Maybe that is a defect in my 
character, though accumulation on seventy dol- 
lars a week has its reluctances when you have 
a wife and baby and a cook and flat and all 
that. Still, if I had no elders to fall back on 
I'd have to pinch some salvage out of every 
dollar. 

90 



THE BABY 

But Cordelia is naturally more retentive than 
I am. It is remarkable how little she cares, 
relatively, for things. She has a good many 
things, and has always been used to them. She 
likes them, but with an interest that is alto- 
gether secondary, preferring power, indepen- 
dence, and tranquillity of mind to objects of 
convenience or embellishment, and to almost 
everything else except health and an easy con- 
science. She has a private fortune — I don't 
know that I have mentioned that — not large, 
but yielding sufficient income to buy her clothes. 
All girls ought to have private fortunes. Small 
ones will do: do better, perhaps, than larger 
ones, for I don't suppose it is quite ideal to be 
swamped by your wife's money. Cordelia gets 
a great deal of comfort out of hers, but I see 
her basis of expenditure is different from mine. 
Mine is adjusted to what I have; hers to what, 
on due reflection, she would rather have than 
money. On that basis she spends not only her 
own money, but mine. I dare say she will be 
a rich woman some day, and, I hope, still mar- 
ried to me; so there is a chance that, with other 
good luck, I may gather some surplus too. I 
believe she dislikes to shop; indeed, I have heard 

91 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

her say so. There is a streak of Scotch in the 
Frenches, and I dare say it happened her way. 
My! my! What luck! When you think of 
the women — and men too, but especially women 
— whose highest happiness is to buy things and 
lug them home, it seems a marvelous dispensa- 
tion that I should have acquired a companion 
of so opposite a sort. To be sure, no girl that 
was infatuated with the joys of purchase would 
have thought twice of me; and yet, who can 
tell, for I suppose there are girls who have 
neither self-restraint nor self-denial about any- 
thing, and are liable to think they must have 
something that really would not suit them at 
all? I have always thought that Rosamond 
Vincy in Middlemarch was the most fatal char- 
acter in literature. What must it be to be 
money-grubber for a woman like that, with an 
expensive appreciation of the material side of 
life and no conception of the rest of it! Stars 
above! how much better it is to be lucky than 
wise, especially in youth, when, as Major Brace 
assures me, none of us know anything. There 
was Solomon, who wrote the Proverbs, and 
Ben Franklin, who wrote Poor Richard; both 

able to make shrewd discourse by the ream, 

99 



THE BABY 

and neither of them fortunate on the domestic 
side. Probably it does not accord with the 
economy of nature that wise men should have 
wise wives; certainly if there is a scheme of 
things that is worthy of respect, it would not 
have fitted into it for me to have a foolish one. 



V 

A CONTRIBUTION FROM MAJOR BRACE 

1 REMARK the disposition of contempo- 
rary American families to regulate their 
church-going by the inclination of the ladies. 
I suppose it will soon happen that Cordelia 
and I will go to church when Cordelia feels it 
to be desirable, and that when she stays at 
home it will look more profitable to me to stay 
at home with her. Although that means that 
we will go pretty regularly, it is not quite as it 
should be, any more than that I should go with- 
out my dinner when she has a failure of the 
appetite. But it seems apt to be so with con- 
temporary Protestant people who get married. 
Even if the male has a previous habit of church- 
going, and convictions or preferences in favor 
of it, the woman is apt to be captain in that 
particular, and to assume command of the 
family conscience. That is an item in the con- 
temporary slump of the male in the business of 

94 



A CONTRIBUTION FROM MAJOR BRACE 

directing the course of life. He tries to keep a 
hand of his own on poHtics, but in the concerns 
of religion easily falls into the practice of look- 
ing to the woman to make his decisions and re- 
mind him of his practices. Which is feeble of 
him, for, as between religion and politics, re- 
ligion is decidedly the more important, for it 
shapes and inspires and regulates the whole 
of life, politics included, whereas politics is no 
more than a detail. 

When I think of women and their needs and 
powers and rights, and their office in life — as I 
do a great deal nowadays, with Cordelia to ob- 
serve and those suffragists prodding at the sub- 
ject all the time — I have bursts of momentary 
conviction to the effect that if women go on 
assimilating four-fifths of the available religion 
and leaving nine-tenths of the alcohol and nearly 
all the tobacco to the men, they will govern 
our world before we know it. The Turks under- 
stand better. The male Turks make a specialty 
of piety, go without rum, and share tobacco 
liberally with their women; so to be a male 
Turk is still a relatively powerful condition, 
though I understand the Turkish ladies are 
restless nowadays, in spite of sweetmeats and 

95 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

cigarettes, and are covetous of education, and 
suspect that there should be more coming to 
them than they are getting. 

Cordelia has intimated that that observation 
of mine about men having strength, and there- 
fore dominion, is something of a bluff. She is 
too polite to contradict it, but not too polite 
to stir me to further reflections about it. Are 
men stronger .^^ Have they dominion .f^ 

There is no doubt that the average man we 
see about can hit harder than the average 
woman. He can also run faster and make 
better time up a tree, so that he seems to have 
the best of it, physically, both in offense and 
escape. If you come to translate these powers 
into practical contemporary factors he can 
usually earn more money at present than she 
can, and is much less vulnerable in the reputa- 
tion. It may be argued that this superiority 
in male abilities is not the work of nature at 
all, but a consequence of male malignancy and 
oppression, and that if woman had a fair show 
to get her due development she could stand up 
to man when he put up his hooks, and run him 
down when he ran away. So Olive Schreiner 
seems to feel about it. Man's power to make 

90 



A CONTRIBUTION FROM MAJOR BRACE 

more money than woman is challenged as an 
injustice. Perhaps it is an injustice in many 
cases. Perhaps our industrial system is not 
adjusted yet to women's undomestic work in 
schools and factories and oJQBces, and maybe 
the payroll will be revised in time in women's 
favor. Still I think man's superior money- 
making powers are of a piece with his power 
to hit harder and run faster. Money-getting 
seems to be more in the line of his natural job 
than of hers. He is less distracted from it by 
other leanings than she is. I guess he will al- 
ways be the head money-getter, though very 
likely her claim on what he gets may come to 
rest even more on a basis of natural right than 
it does at present. It is a very much respected 
claim as it is, and supported by law and senti- 
ment. 

Man is superior in some kinds of bodily 
strength, and apparently in some kinds of 
mental strength, too, but does it give him 
dominion? Some, I think. It seems to give 
him a good deal of dominion among savages, 
and less and less as civilization increases. 
Probably it would give him more if he were 

not inferior in some of the kinds of strength, 

97 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

and in some other respects that we are not used 
to classify as strength, but which offset it. 
There are war-powers and peace-powers. Ad- 
mitting, in spite of Kiphng's she-bear poem, 
that man's war-powers beat woman's, how about 
peace-powers? Of course they are enormous. 
If she uses them for offense, she can spoil the 
man's cake at any time. There is no living 
without women, and to be assigned to one of 
them and have her contrive that there shall 
be no living with her makes a serious dilemma. 
I have discussed this matter with our old friend 
Major Brace, and he has illuminated it with 
such wisdom as his great age (as he says) has 
enabled him to supply. "We can't do anything, 
Peregrine," he said, "but try our utmost [of 
course he really said damnedest] to make them 
happy, and hope that they will be good." He 
told me a story about a house-painter he once 
knew in the country who had some ferrets. 
"I noticed when looking at the ferrets," the 
Major said, "that he had a padlock on the 
place where he kept them, and he let me know, 
somehow, that he carried the key in his pocket 
and let nobody but himself meddle with them. 
I took note of that, because it seemed to me 

98 



A CONTRIBUTION FROM MAJOR BRACE 

that the ferrets being part of the domestic 
estabhshment, the natural way would have 
been to leave the key in the house when he was 
away and intrust the ferrets to his wife. But 
that was not his way, and I set him down in 
my mind as a believer in male dominion and 
an upholder of the authority of the head of the 
house. And, accordingly, when I heard about 
a year later that his wife had eloped with the 
butcher I wasn't at all surprised. No doubt he 
had felt about her as he had about the ferrets 
— that she was his property. I heard that he 
was extremely put out when she ran away, and 
took it so much to heart that he left the vil- 
lage. I suppose he didn't know any better, 
though of course it is possible that the woman 
was a fool and couldn't be trusted. Her going 
off with the butcher implies a certain careless- 
ness, though not necessarily a lack of intelli- 
gence. 

"You see. Peregrine, one measure of the lib- 
erty of women is the intelligence of man. And 
it works the other way round, too. A man who 
is intelligent enough to prefer a free woman for 
his companion will plan and take thought to 
have one; and a woman who is clever enough 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSB.\ND 

to prefer a free man will take thought to keep 
her man free and still keep him. That's what 
all decent people do nowadays who are passably 
wise, and I suppose it is what such people have 
been doing, not always, perhaps, but easily 
since the time of Adam. And I dare say the 
better-grade animals do the like." 

I asked the Major if he thought Kipling was 
right about the she-bear and the superior oiff en- 
si veness of females. He said he thought there 
was a good deal of meat in Kipling's verses, 
and that few intelligent men came to be half 
a century old without having had to take 
thought of the intensity of the female disposi- 
tion. "Somehow, Peregrine," said he, "they 
seem to be a little nearer nature than we are. 
The primitive creature seems to survive in them 
a little more perceptibly than it does in us. 
And it is a very valuable survival — very valu- 
able — and fit to receive the most respectful 
consideration, because, as Kipling intimates, it 
is a factor in the continuation of the race. 
When a man has a wise wife who loves him, 
as you and I have. Peregrine, it is his business 
to get the benefit of everything she has. All 
her strength as well as his is needed in their 

100 



A CONTRIBUTION FROM MAJOR BRACE 

common business. If he troubles her with his 
limitations, checks her initiative, and ignores 
her dissent, it is as bad for the common interest 
as when she does the like to him. He should 
attend to her risings-up and her sittings-down, 
and when at times the primitive creature rises 
up in her, his best procedure often is neither to 
run nor to try to rule the storm, but to sit down 
in the sand, wrap his burnoose around his head, 
and keep his face attentively to leeward until 
the gale blows out and calm re-eventuates. 
Then, in due time, she will dig him out again, 
if necessary, and he will have much less to un- 
say and repent of than if he had talked back. 
And usually, if he has been attentive, he will 
have learned something that it is valuable to 
know. 

"Lord love us," went on the Major, "I hate 
subdued wives. I hate subdued husbands also, 
but subdued wives worse, if possible, because 
what subdues a wife is usually such an offensive 
combination of egotism and stupidity. And 
yet I know quite able men who bully their 
wives and have checked their wives' develop- 
ment and diminished their abilities by doing 
so. It is a shocking waste, although it is to 

101 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

admire the wives who bear it. That is apt to 
be the best thing they can do, under the cir- 
cumstances. You see, in marriage that sug- 
gestion of Scripture about cutting off the right 
hand that offends has only limited application. 
Man or woman of us, when we have stood up 
in church and acquired a right hand of the op- 
posite gender, we have need to go mighty slow 
about casting it from us. To read the divorce 
statistics, and about the growi:h of that practice 
in this country in the last twenty years, you'd 
think divorce was on the way to become a uni- 
versal habit. But I guess it won't. I guess 
when the ratio has reached a point where it 
provides duly for the irresponsible, intemper- 
ate, light-minded, and unfortunate, the increase 
will stop, and maybe, if civilization improves, 
the figures will begin to run the other way. 
That may seem optimistic, but I can't think 
that woman's extraordinary gift for living with 
man, and man's surprising talent for getting 
along with woman, are going to perish or be 
wasted." 

My coevals that I meet are still talking about 
football; not exclusively, of course, but with 

102 



A CONTRIBUTION FROM MAJOR BRACE 

perseverance and of a lively appearance of in- 
terest. Talking about it has some obvious 
advantages over playing it, but I never learned 
to be really expert in either. Cordelia and I 
saved quantities of money last fall staying away 
from football games. Also quite a lot in stay- 
ing away from the great final series in pro- 
fessional baseball. Also time and strength on 
both of these items. If our circumstances had 
been four or five times as easy and Samuel 
could have spared us, we would have enriched 
our experience of contemporary life by taking 
in several of these contests. As studies in 
crowdology they are mighty good and leave 
permanent impressions behind them. And they 
are interesting socially and anthropologically. 
And sometimes they are pretty good as sport — 
the football games better, I think, than before 
the rules were changed. But as it was, it was 
a very easy economy for us. Cordelia said she 
had been to football games and didn't believe 
there were any important new thrills left in 
them for her; and we read a lot about them in 
the papers and were content, though I don't 
think football really makes first-class news- 
paper reading. I can't follow the ball in type 
8 103 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

even as well as from the seats, and I only get 
the score and the spectacular features. The 
worst of it is I cannot care inordinately who 
wins. Of course, the players do. They ought 
to. And so should the undergraduates and 
persons just emerged from that condition. 
But I don't understand why such large masses 
of adult people contrive to care so much — if 
they really do — whether Harvard beats Yale, 
or either of them beats Princeton, or whether 
the Army or the Navy wins. 

I am getting deplorably careless in my feel- 
ings in this great subject. To be sure, when 
there is a big game I want to know how it has 
gone, and buy the latest evening paper and take 
it home and assimilate, and discuss a little, its 
disclosures about what the score was and why 
it was so. But however it turns out it doesn't 
affect my appetite for dinner, nor my interest 
in food, and I can't talk about it more than 
half an hour. And when the Sunday paper 
comes with all the details I am apt to get in- 
terested in other news and skip the football 
stories altogether, or until late at night. 

Really, I am ashamed. It comes, no doubt, 
with increase of years and the pressure of re- 

104 



A CONTRIBUTION FROM MAJOR BRACE 

sponsibilities and concern about the more vital 
details of human existence. Cordelia reviles 
me and says I am getting older than my years. 
Maybe I am, mentally, though she is just about 
as much interested in football as I am, and no 
more. I suppose sport naturally falls into a 
secondary place in the thoughts of people who 
have a living to make and rent to pay and a 
child to raise. If everybody was like us, sport 
might languish, and that would be a pity. I'm 
glad they're not. The Pharisee was not so far 
out, perhaps, in thanking God he was not like 
other men. The trouble was, he did not go 
on and thank God that other men were not like 
him. There needs to be great variety in the 
world if all the jobs are to get attention. I'm 
thankful that the prosperity of football does not 
depend on me, and that I can be bored by it 
without detriment to the great cause of sport, 
because, I suppose, it really is a great cause, 
and related to the perpetuation of vigor and 
virility in men. 

I have been thinking about celibates. There 
is something to be said for persons to whom 
celibacy comes natural. To most persons it 

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KEFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

does not come natural. It never did to me, 
for instance. I hate it when it is forced, and 
object with what may be a Protestant detesta- 
tion to vows that bind people to it; but there 
are marvelously useful people in the ranks of 
the unmarried. 

1 Brookfield, a contemporary whose line is edu- 
cation, has been telling me a story about a rich 
man, named Thompson, who has got interested 
in the improvement of mankind. Somebody 
said the other day that the men who get rich 
are those who are able to get more out of other 
people than other people get out of them. That 
is a very plausible definition and good as far as 
it goes, but the story I heard made me realize 
that it doesn't cover all the ground, and that 
many rich men are creators of wealth. This 
Thompson that I heard of had extraordinary 
brains for business. He could think to the 
bottom of propositions, and think out all their 
details and perceive whether they could be 
made profitable and how. He got at business 
almost as young as Alexander Hamilton, for his 
parents, who were good people, both died when 
he was fifteen and left him, as you might say, 
with his hat on, going out to look for means of 

106 



A CONTRIBUTION FROM MAJOR BRACE 

support. He went to a big town and got a 
job with a good concern. At the end of three 
years he was ill, probably from overwork. His 
employer told him to go away and stay two 
months and get rested. He went, and stayed 
six weeks, and came back with the biggest 
bunch of orders that the firm had ever had. 
His employer saw then that he was incorri- 
gible, and pretty soon he took him into part- 
nership. 

Now there comes another likeness to Hamil- 
ton. The boy wanted to know more, and deter- 
mined that when he had got money enough he 
would quit work and go off and study. He 
calculated that he would have a million dol- 
lars by the time he was twenty-six, and he 
thought that would do. He actually did get 
his million and something to spare at twenty- 
six (and this is not a newspaper story, either; 
Brookfield told it to me), and actually did pull 
out and go off to Europe and spent three years 
in France and Germany improving his mind. 
Now comes in his gift of celibacy, in which he 
was quite different from Hamilton — who never 
had any discernible talent that way — and from 
me. Instead of getting married and raising a 

107 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

family, and having a flower-garden and horses 
and cows — this being before they had invented 
automobiles — and enjoying life, he did not get 
married at all. I don't know why not. Maybe 
he didn't know how and was too old to learn; 
maybe somebody else persuaded the girl that 
he aspired to persuade. At any rate, he didn't 
marry, but came home and made lots more 
money, and finally retired from active business 
and set his wits to see what he could do to make 
the world better. Now he lives on twelve or 
fifteen thousand a year, and spends most of his 
strength and his surplus income and more or 
less of his principal chiefly on one considerable 
enterprise that combines philanthropy and 
education. But he is dragged back into busi- 
ness now and then, Brookfield told me, when 
a commercial rescue job offers, that looks so 
difficult that nobody else will touch it. 

Of course, celibacy has no particular bearing 
on Thompson's usefulness except that he was 
qualified to get along with it, and it left him 
entirely free to spend himself in trying to better 
the general conditions of life. It is not news 
that there are always some mighty useful 
bachelors about. Still less is it news that there 

108 



A CONTRIBUTION FROM MAJOR BRACE 

are many indispensable spinsters. I suppose 
the sentiment that everybody must get married 
and have four children has got some open seams 
in it; but a life is the thing that folks like best 
to leave in the world, and with reason, for, on 
the whole, a life, if it is good enough, lasts the 
best of anything, and leaves the most imperish- 
able effects. 

It is too soon yet to say if my son Samuel is 
going to leave an imperishable effect in the 
world, but he is doing well, and the more perish- 
able effects have already been found to be so 
little suited to him that one of his grandmothers 
has given him a modern rag-doll — an elegant 
creation that comes from a shop — and the other 
a teddy-bear. Teddy-bears are scarcer in the 
toy shops than they were, because the current 
of politics has rolled on, but they can still 
be had and may yet become more plentiful. 
Samuel lives a care-free life. In that respect 
he is an example and encouragement to us all. 
He assumes no responsibility about anything, 
takes his nourishment without turning a hair or 
sweating so much as one bead, and shows indif- 
ference to the primal curse. It is cheering and 
strengthening to have such a spirit in the family. 

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REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

Ben Bowling, who came home with me to 
dinner the other night, has some of Samuel's 
quality. Ben likes life and does not care what 
happens. I threatened him with universal 
prohibition and the total disappearance of po- 
table grog from Christendom. He said it would 
never happen so, but if it did he didn't care. 
He drank too much, anyhow, and if there was 
nothing to drink it would be good for his health 
and save him lots of money. I threatened him 
with woman suffrage. He refused even to ob- 
ject; said checkers was still checkers after all 
the pieces had got into the king-row, and as 
good a game as ever, though with differences 
of detail. I threatened him with stagnation 
of all industrial activity as the result of enforc- 
ing the Sherman law. He didn't care; said 
he worked too hard, anyway, and needed a 
rest; could eat very simple food at a pinch; 
w^as too fat; was threatened with an unsuitable 
entanglement of the affections, and might es- 
cape the bag if the times were hard enough. 
Then we all talked about the Sherman law. I 
see in the papers that the consumption of 
alcoholic drinks in the United States last year 
was the greatest on record. No wonder, when 

110 



A CONTRIBUTION FROM MAJOR BRACE 

you think how much the Sherman law has been 
talked over: a dry subject on which you get 
no further and sink into despondency unless 
buoyed up. It is funny to see the sagacity of 
the country flunked, apparently, by that prob- 
lem. What Ben and I agree on is so, and we 
agreed that the Sherman law, grinding out 
prosecutions and disorganizing business because 
public opinion could not settle on any plan to 
improve or amend it, was not unlike the silver- 
purchase law that kept loading silver into the 
Treasury and scaring off gold until Cleveland 
finally got it repealed. We did not agree that 
the Sherman law ought to be repealed, but did 
agree that it might elect the next President. 
Also that neither party was satisfied with any 
one who was running for nomination, though 
that is perhaps not an unusual condition when 
nomination is still five or six months off. But 
Ben did not care. He was attentive, interested, 
and amused, but hoped to stay aboard, no 
matter what the weather was, and help in 
navigation if his services were required. He 
and Samuel are reassuring. 

Another thing I find reassuring is the glimpses 

I get now and then of men who are at work 

111 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

providing government for the country; espe- 
cially unadvertised men whom few people ever 
hear of, who hold no office and aspire to none; 
whose pictures are never in the papers, nor their 
names in the reporter's books or the mouths 
of the multitude. I heard the other day about 
one such person (Brookfield told me), a man of 
sufficient fortune — a million, I dare say — not 
a celibate like Thompson, but married and with 
a few children; a shrew^d, experienced, thought- 
ful man, whose interest in life is and always 
has been politics, to handle the machinery of 
it and get the best results compatible with the 
material offered to pass laws and fill the offices, 
and the prejudices and mental disabilities of 
the voters. "I have known that man," Brook- 
field said, "for eighteen years, and watched him 
play politics all that time; plan and direct; 
weigh men and choose between them; use their 
talents and abilities when they had them; put 
them in places where they belonged when he 
could; put in the next-best man when he 
couldn't. He always played fair; always 
wanted the best man, the best law, and the 
best principle that he could see, and never 
wanted anything for himself except the fun of 

112 



A CONTRIBUTION FROM MAJOR BRACE 

playing the game. You couldn't drive him 
into office. He never tried to make a penny 
out of legislation. The less he was seen and 
heard of the better he liked it, but he recognized 
politics as the great man's game, and he liked 
to play it. No doubt the sense of power was 
pleasant to him, but his use of power was en- 
tirely conscientious, and the source of his power 
was never money, but the confidence that men 
had in his sagacity and his unselfishness. Back 
in him somewhere there was, of course, a sense 
of duty and a belief in certain principles of 
government, and a sort of unconscious con- 
secration to the desire to see our experiment 
in government go well and to see the country 
prosper. But the immediate interest that kept 
his mind busy was just a delight in guiding the 
political affairs of men." 

I dare say Brookfield's man is an exceptional 
political boss; but I dare say, also, that in so 
far as we have, or ever have had, or will have, 
decent government, we owe it to somebody 
who has had a call to provide it for us, and has 
had the talents necessary to make his call 
effective. The rare thing about Brookfield's 
man, as he described him, was his self-efface- 

113 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

merit and superiority to vanity. He loved to 
play the game, but not only never thought of 
the gate money, but never cared to be a grand- 
stand player. To do the job and do it well 
brought him the joy of a true artist in his art. 
As I said, I have felt encouraged about the 
future of politics in this country since I heard 
about him. If he had been a saint I wouldn't 
have been so much encouraged, but Brookfield 
represented him as a mere human being, like 
any of us, looking about for things that in- 
terested his mind and made life taste good, and 
finding them supremely in politics. It is an 
encouragement to find that our politics is so 
good a game that folks with money and brains 
enough to experiment with pleasures will play 
at it purely for their inward satisfaction, and 
without attention even to the applause. Of 
course, men of that temperament and that high 
degree of sagacity and self-control are rare, but 
we have our share of men with an insight into 
cause and effect, and an understanding of the 
human mind both in the individual and in the 
crowd, and with ability to hear what is going 
on when they put their ears to the ground, and 
with a lively interest in human affairs that must 

114 



A CONTRIBUTION FROM MAJOR BRACE 

surely draw them into politics whenever they 
see that politics is a paramount interest. We 
have no picturesque Dukes of Devonshire 
drudging dutifully at government without 
vanity or political ambition, as fathers drudge 
for their families, and as Washington, maybe, 
drudged for us, but I believe we have a native 
product of our own that does like work, and 
quite as often with intelligence, because the 
work calls to them and because they not only 
feel the responsibilities of civilization, but find 
delight in undertaking them. 

And why not, to be sure! What else is there 
in life that is so fruitful in recompenses as a 
cheerful undertaking of the responsibilities of 
civilization? Mine are represented mainly, as 
yet, by Cordelia and Samuel, but I mean to 
undertake lots more. I see quantities of them 
about waiting to be undertaken. So does Cor- 
delia, who is one of the most active and respon- 
sible of responsibilities, and, being less tied up 
to wage-earning than I am, gives more attention 
to putting props under civilization. 



VI 

POLITICS 

MY calling does not seem nowadays to inspire 
respect. Folks hoot at lawyers, declaring 
with much reiteration that law has ceased to 
be a profession and become a business. They 
vary that by pointing out that all the best 
talent in it is bought up day by day by the 
corporations and the rich. Even the judges — 
look at them ! The current disposition is, when 
you don't like a decision of a court, to take the 
judge's number and write to the management 
to have him fired. It is to laugh at decisions 
and the feeling about them. The other day 
the United States Supreme Court decided some- 
thing thus and so by four to three. Justices 
1, 3, and 5 protested vigorously. Personally I 
sustained the dissenting opinion, and thought 
the decision left the law in a bad condition. 
That could be cured by Congress, which is per- 
haps the best way^ but the popular method 

116 



POLITICS 

would be to dock Justices 2, 4, 6, and 7 a 
month's pay, and try the case again with a full 
court. That's how folks seem to feel, and per- 
haps some of them would act on their feelings. 

8ome of them! Stars above! What some 
of us would do is past guessing. What some 
of us are thought capable of doing quite out- 
runs belief, but that is because the air is charged 
with politics and with plans and specifications 
for making over the world, and with a percept- 
ible leaning, as I have intimated, toward be- 
ginning with the legal profession. 

Oh, well, let 'em! I'm not afraid. A man 
who can make a living by law can make a living 
at something else if necessary. It is the under- 
standing when they put young fellows to learn 
the law that they will be qualified, more or less, 
if they learn it, not only to be lawyers, but to 
be bankers, brokers, railroad officers, editors, mil- 
liners, grocers, contractors, and nurses-general 
to ailing industries, and undertakers. Ac- 
cordingly they usually appoint lawyers to 
receiverships, and usually the appointees go 
ahead and bury the patient. No doubt it is a 
natural consequence of this theory that lawyers 
shall know and do everybody's business that 

117 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

there is this prevalence of impressions that 
everybody ought to be able to beat the lawyers 
at law. Of course there ought to be reciprocity 
in onmiscience. Of course the lawyer trade can 
be overdone, but there's more to it than these 
recall people think. I guess it will last my time. 
It's the science of keeping order in the world. 
I admit that it needs assistance from cops and 
sometimes from soldiers, and cannon and war- 
ships, and that too much of the time it keeps a 
sort of crystallized disorder that has to be 
smashed occasionally and rearranged. But 
when it comes to rearrangement, back they 
come to the lawyers, professors of the science 
of keeping order in the world. 

It is interesting how people divide in politics. 
All the decent people seem to be after the same 
thing, more or less, but differ according to 
knowledge, temperament, circumstances, and 
affiliations as to methods of getting it. And the 
differences last so wonderfully! There's free 
trade and protection, or high and low protection 
— we've been discussing those matters in this 
country voluminously and insistently for from 
fifty to a hundred years, and by far the most 
of us don't know now precisely where we stand. 

118 



POLITICS 

We are, reasonably enough, for as much im- 
provement as will do us good, and not for any 
more than is helpful at the price. But tariff- 
improvement isn't to be had in quarter-yard 
lengths. Congress makes a rough effort to 
please customers, and when it has finished it 
is take it or leave it, and the customers usually 
go off grumbling. 

And the other things that people want — re- 
straint of corporations, restraint of labor-unions, 
restraint of political bosses, changes in the 
machinery of politics, hand-made government 
by the people, single taxes, income taxes, 
minimum wages, municipal ownership of public 
utilities, votes for women — my gracious — there's 
a new remedy every day. 

Not but that many of them are good and 
some of them timely. The world seems to be 
progressive nowadays, and I suppose its prog- 
ress is upward, and not to the bow-wows. But 
it is to wonder about every proposed change 
whether it is really improvement or merely 
change, and about every novelty that people 
clamor for whether their true need is not some- 
thing else — a change in themselves, rather than 
any practicable change in the regulations of life. 

9 119 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

For one need not be very old to observe that 
different people make out very differently in 
the same circumstances, and that folks affect 
circumstances much more than circumstances 
affect folks. Yet circumstances do affect folks 
very much, crush them sometimes, and stunt 
or warp them often; and certainly there is an 
obligation in the folks who have it in them to 
affect circumstances to improve them for the 
benefit of all hands, and provide reasonable 
access to opportunity. 

Do I get in with the cart-tail orators this 
campaign? Why not, to be sure? Politics has 
been an early crop this year, sprouting hard in 
March, and working overtime ever since, with 
an enormous profusion of discourse and a vast 
expenditure of time and money in a general 
public effort to get somewhere. But that's all 
right. The crop is going to be worth the labor. 
This is really the first time the political school 
has been run wide open since Bryan's first cam- 
paign, and that was sixteen years ago, a period 
that carries me clear back to Eton collars. Alas 
for me! I suppose I'm a sort of conservative. 
They ought to examine the blood and find out 
where people belong, and save us some of our 

120 



POLITICS 

mental struggles to discover it by cerebral 
analysis. I don't know what's in my blood, 
but when people are for scuttling the ship so 
as to get the boats out easier I always seem to 
be for some other plan. Now and then it's 
necessary to scuttle. There was the everlast- 
ing French Revolution, where they blew up 
their ship, and in the long run made a good 
thing out of it. But that was an exceptionally 
rotten ship, and they had things fixed aboard 
so that the crew were too successfully separated 
from the grub — a feat that a large share of 
human ability seems always at work to accom- 
plish, and which, when it is successfully pulled 
off, achieves a very penetrating and compre- 
hensive quality of ruin. Perhaps it is the con- 
servative molecules in my blood that makes me 
as much adverse to this detachment of the crew 
from the grub as I am to blowing up the ship. 
No true friend of navigation wants either of 
them. 

I guess it's more fun to be a meat-ax radical 
than a conservative. The ax-handle is a simple 
implement, and probably blisters the hands less 
than this eternal pulling on the sheets and 
throwing the wheel over. But we don't really 

121 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

choose our line in politics. We take the steer 
we get from our inside, and which comes down 
to us, no doubt, from our forebears, along with 
the tendency to fat or lean, and variations in 
the adherence of hairs to our scalps. I dare 
say we are not as grateful as we should be to 
other persons whose molecular inheritance is 
different from ours for going their way and fol- 
lowing their hereditary propensities, so that 
we can better and more helpfully follow ours. 
If we all got the same steer I dare say the ship 
would run aground. To avoid that there comes 
this variety of propensity, and also the great 
principle of reaction on inherited inclinations, 
which has always raised up from time to time 
such valuable and efficient revolutionaries. 
The pinch for the natural conservatives comes 
at times when conservatism has outrun its 
license and crystallized into a do-nothingness 
which is more dangerous than radicalism. Then 
the real conservatives like me, who always want 
to let things down easy, have to flop, and it is 
always a very nice matter to know just when 
to do it and what to flop to. 

This is a pretty floppy year, no doubt about 

it. I'd give a penny to know whose cart-tail, if 

122 



POLITICS 

any, I should aspire to mount. Great din at 
this writing, and a handsome field of candidates, 
with leaders whom we have been contemplating 
for months, and putting on the scales and pull- 
ing off, and whose points we have reckoned and 
re-reckoned. And as it comes to the choice, 
how prevalent is dubiety of mind as to whether 
we shall get candidates for whom we want to 
vote! Was there ever such a lot of men put 
up for office? I read the papers, all varieties 
of them, and have been studying candidates 
hard now for three or four months, and begin 
to wonder how so many incompetent or un- 
principled citizens have contrived to cheat the 
gallows and avoid all places of detention all 
these years. Not one of them has so much as 
been to jail as yet. I dare say they would pass 
even now as half-way decent men if they were 
not candidates. Perhaps we are too particular. 
I notice that a large proportion of the impor- 
tant work in the world has been done by pretty 
bad men: men, some of them, who would have 
been insufferable if they had not been indis- 
pensable. When things are in a bad-enough 
hole, the indispensable man has to be taken 
whether he is insufferable or not. But luckily 

123 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

we're not up against it so hard as that. Nobody 
seems indispensable this year. Our world 
seems to me less tippy nowadays, blowing as it 
is at all its blow-holes, than it did six or seven 
years ago, when stocks were kiting and being 
kited, and everybody was consolidating, and 
every active person who wasn't a syndicate or 
an underwriter of something was asking the 
way to those fashionable employments. We 
have blown off a lot of steam since then, and 
our safety-valves are all working pretty well; 
and, though they're noisy, to me they don't 
look dangerous. We must be patient with the 
candidates, and look sometimes on their bright 
sides. When we regard them all with discon- 
tent, it is too much like that common saying, 
"Why do women marry such men.^" They 
marry the best in sight, and that's all we can 
do about candidates. But, by George! the 
light that beats upon a throne is mere moon- 
shine to the light that beats upon a candidate. 
We shall see about the candidates, but just 
what we shall see beats me. 



VII 

WE DINE OUT AND DISCUSS EDUCATION 

WE want to ask people to dinner — at least 
/ do — and do ask a good many, first and 
last, in spite of restricted space and our other 
restrictions. About four besides ourselves is 
our limit, and that's a dinner-party. More 
often I bring home a man, or a married pair 
of our generation come in and bring new topics 
and points of view, and sometimes news, into 
our discourse. People seem willing enough to 
come to dinner if you have something to eat 
in the house and something to say. I sometimes 
wish we had more dinner-parties, but the doc- 
trine of compensation comes in on that, for, I 
suppose, if we were rich enough to have people 
to dinner whenever we wanted, we would have 
to dine out the rest of the time, and the up- 
shot of it would be that we would never have 
time to read up anything really good to say. 
But we do dine out considerably as it is, not 

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REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

only with our cherished relatives who regale 
us when occasion offers (and also when it 
doesn't) with meat, drink, and affection, but 
also with our friends, both those who live some- 
what near our economic plane and those who 
move and have beings in planes much more 
exalted and profuse. 

For example, we dine sometimes with Major 
and Mrs. Brace, indulgent elders of whom I 
have so often spoken, and who, I think, are dis- 
posed to assume some restricted but affection- 
ate responsibility for our successful progress 
through this vale of dues. We are on such 
terms with that family that Mrs. Brace has a 
habit of telephoning to Cordelia please 4o come 
and fill in at a dinner-party when a pair of 
guests give out at the last moment, which we 
do, when we can, with cheerfulness of spirit. 
Then the Major bestows little jobs of law busi- 
ness on me from time to time, and is apt to say 
"Come to dinner, and talk it over, and fetch 
Cordelia." And then we talk other things over 
also, and maybe play auction bridge for an 
hour. 

The last one of Mrs. Brace's dinners we filled 
in at was unusually well stocked with persons 

126 



WE DINE OUT AND DISCUSS EDUCATION 

apt at discussion, and the talk took a turn 
toward the education of women, and more par- 
ticularly the education of daughters of well- 
to-do parents in New York. On the general 
subject I don't see that there is much to dis- 
cuss. The prevailing practice is to teach girls 
up to eighteen or nineteen years of age any- 
thing that they will consent to learn, the same 
as boys. The girls don't go to college yet as 
generally as the boys do, but they go a good 
deal, and more and more, I should say, all the 
time. The girls' colleges prosper and increase 
in number and in size, but the authorities seem 
to feel that they have not yet fully struck their 
gait; not yet established themselves as the 
best places for girls in general between eighteen 
and twenty-two, and not yet demonstrated to 
the satisfaction of all the observant and con- 
siderate that the training they give fulfils its 
aim, and is better worth the time of girls who 
acquire it or might acquire it than some other 
things that some of them are or might be doing 
in those four years, if they were not doing that. 
You may say that the same reluctance of 
unrestricted approval attaches to the boys' 
colleges. There was the New Haven lady who 

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REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

felt so strongly that Yale was one of the more 
popular gates of hell, and the late Mr. Crane, 
of Chicago, who maintained that our whole 
system of college education was pernicious and 
a shocking waste of time, and Dr. Wilson, late 
of Princeton, who felt so strongly that the 
college side-shows, athletic and social, had di- 
verted to themselves the stronger currents of 
young life, to the great detriment of the aca- 
demic perfomance in the main tent, and who 
did what he could to bring them back. Cer- 
tainly the boys' colleges are imperfect enough, 
and are conceded both by their friends and their 
detractors to be so, but at least they have won 
in the competition with home training. As a 
rule, the boys who can, go to college. They 
may not get there what they should, but they 
are not kept at home and put into business, or 
brought out into society, for fear that what 
they may miss by not staying at home will be 
more valuable than what they may gain by 
being in college. All sorts of boys go to college; 
the rich and the poor, the fashionable and the 
simple; the boys with a living to scramble for, 
and those with cotton-wadded places and ready- 
made incomes waiting for them. It is felt 

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WE DINE OUT AND DISCUSS EDUCATION 

that boys must know one another if they know 
nothing else, and that college is a good place 
to get that knowledge. 

So it is felt about girls, that they must know 
one another, and also boys, if nothing else, but 
college is not yet the place where the more 
modish girls in the biggest cities can know the 
girls whom it belongs to them to know. The 
American girls from the big cities who are 
advantageously situated for experiments in 
polite society do not yet go much to college. 
Their brothers go as matter of course. Their 
brothers, like as not, are sent five or six years 
to boarding-school, and then three or four 
years to college, and then perhaps kept away 
several years longer learning the rudiments of 
some profession in which they start to work 
at twenty-five or later. But to keep the girls 
off in institutions away from their mothers, 
until they reach so ripe an age as that, or even 
the maturity of twenty-two, is an experiment 
that affectionate parents who have social as- 
pirations for their daughters, and some means 
of furthering them, are apt to look upon with 
hostility, doubt, or, at best, with grudging and 

uncertain approval. The mass of the college 

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REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

girls seems to be recruited from the lesser cities, 
or from families whose daughters have a doubt- 
ful prospect, or worse, of inheriting means of 
support, and must, as a matter of common 
prudence, be qualified betimes for self-mainte- 
nance and all the kinds of self-help, against a 
turn of fortune that may leave them without 
a competent wage-earner to depend on. 

These considerations all got due attention 
at Mrs. Brace's dinner-party. "Send Maria 
to college?" exclaimed Mrs. Van Pelt. "What 
for? She's eighteen, and has been to school 
as it is ever since she was four years old, and to 
boarding-school three years, and knows an enor- 
mous amount, and can read and spell fairly, 
speak some French, and read German, and 
knows the English kings, and a few of the 
Presidents, and whether Dryden or Milton 
wrote the *Fairy Queen.' Mercy! The child's 
crammed with knowledge; what she needs to 
know is how to use some of it. She can't talk 
at a dinner-party. I want her to learn to talk. 
I want her to have an acquaintance. It won't 
hurt her to inspect the young gentlemen. The 
colleges are nunneries, full of nuns whose 
mothers I don't know, busy learning unim- 

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WE DINE OUT AND DISCUSS EDUCATION 

port ant things like how to cut up frogs, and the 
pedigrees of the Saxon kings, and eschatology, 
and neglecting all the important things like how 
to put on a hat, how to cut up a lobster, how to 
keep hair attached to the scalp, how to talk to 
a boy, how to help a mother, how to engage a 
cook, whom to ask to a dinner-party. Why 
college? Maria 'd come home in four years, 
forgotten by all the girls she ought to know, 
qualified to be a school-teacher and with a large 
acquaintance among young ladies similarly 
qualified, and with a strong and reasonable 
impulse to put her acquirements to practical 
use either by continuing her studies or getting 
a situation and earning her living. I don't 
want her to get a situation and earn her living, 
I want her to get married." 

"Oh, come!" said the Major, who was sitting 
next to her. "It isn't so bad as that. I know 
Maria. She'll get married anyhow, but give 
her time. Does she want to go to college.^" 

"She could have gone. She knew enough 
when she got out of school. She passed the 
examinations, and she thought about it more 
or less. But finally she came out instead. 
She may go yet. I don't know. She still talks 

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REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

to her father about it, and meanwhile she takes 
courses with learned women about art and such 
things, and does something at music. And she 
goes to dances a little, and dines out a little, 
and slums a little, and organizes charity a 
little." 

"Does she play with the boys?" 
"A very little. The young men don't seem 
to be the absorbing interest they were when I 
was young. But I suppose that is more a 
change in human nature. New York has come 
to be a good deal of a street-car, with people 
crowding in and out all the time, and the con- 
ductor perpetually calling out, 'Please move 
up there in front!' Girls and young men don't 
meet here familiarly any more. I don't know 
how they ever see enough of one another to get 
married unless they meet in the summer some- 
where. New York girls seem mostly to marry 
men they meet on steamers, nowadays." 

"I understand," said the Major, "that our 
population is now divided into those who travel 
and those who stay at home. Those who travel 
meet, especially on steamers where they are 
cooped up together with a week of idle time on 
their hands and are liable to develop mutual 

132 



WE DINE OUT AND DISCUSS EDUCATION 

appreciations. Those who don't travel also 
meet more or less, and some of them seem to 
marry. There were you and Cordelia, Pere- 
grine; you were not a traveler, yet you got 
married somehow." 

"Oh yes," said I. "I had to. There was 
nothing else that I wanted to do that was com- 
patible with earning a living. I never traveled. 
I never could; but Cordelia traveled plenty." 

"To be sure," put in Mrs. Van Pelt, "they 
can travel if they don't go to college. It doesn't 
cost much more, and they have the time. And 
they do travel. Also they visit about with 
their school friends, and find their way about 
Boston and Philadelphia and Washington and 
other places more civilized than this, and I have 
known of girls who went to visit in St. Louis, 
Chicago, and St. Paul, which was interesting 
and enlarging to the mind, though not so neces- 
sary perhaps as though we did not have the 
finished products of those cities brought daily 
to our doors, and could not inspect them and 
the rest of the United States any day on Fifth 
Avenue, or by walking through the Waldorf- 
Astoria or the Plaza Hotel, or at home, or out 
at dinner — and I beg you to recognize, Mrs. 

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REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

Lamson, that I remember that we borrowed 
you from Seattle, and you and your husband, 
Mrs. Butler, from Buffalo, and that I, who was 
brought here from Baltimore, speak humbly 
and with great respect of all our Western cities. 
But send your girl to college, and then she is 
like a butterfly pinned to a card. Can't visit, 
can't travel, can't beguile her father, can't con- 
sole her mother, can't take her brother to dances, 
can't pay calls, lost to earth, learning the family 
connections of mollusks — what is a mollusk.^^ — 
and the other unusable things that erudite peo- 
ple have put into tiresome books. And yet I 
don't doubt that Maria's father will send her 
to college if she wants to go." 

Mr. Van Pelt, farther down the table, seeing 
that his wife had the floor, had lent an ear to 
her deliverance. "Well," said he, "what can 
you do.f^ Four years is only four years, and a 
girl in these days can afford to spend it in 
getting something definite and lasting, if only 
she gets it. I only know this game of being a 
girl by observation. I have never played at it. 
But my wife knows it as a player, and what she 
perceives in it by experience and instinct always 
outweighs my theories in my own judgment. 

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WE DINE OUT AND DISCUSS EDUCATION 

She decides these matters except in so far as 
Maria decides them for herself, which is a good 
ways. My wife is uncertain about the good of 
girls' colleges because she never went to one. 
They're very new. They didn't prevail so 
much in her educational period as they do now. 
They must be excellent for girls whose mothers 
are desperate or frivolous characters, from 
whom they need to be separated. All the in- 
stitutions are valuable in separating children 
with possibilities from impossible parents. But 
where the parents are not impossible, of course 
the separation involves loss. We feel as to 
boys that the gain pretty certainly counter- 
balances it. But we feel that girls do well to 
form the habit of living at home, which is some- 
thing that takes practice, and even prayers, 
if you're going to do it as you should. If Maria 
goes to college, I'm for having her sleep at home, 
where I can see her at dinner. Though whether 
that's right or not, I don't know. I don't ex- 
pect to give Maria more than a very imperfect 
steer in this life anyhow. That's all I got; all 
my wife got; all my father and mother got. 
But I don't mind taking a chance if it looks 
good, and the fact that college does not fit con- 

10 135 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

veniently into the social machinery that has 
been devised for the development of girls in New 
York does not appall me. The machinery exists 
for the benefit of the girls, not the girls for the 
machinery. What we are after is to traiQ fine 
women. You don't do it by wholesale processes. 
It is hard work, anyhow, and what suits one 
doesn't suit another. It is with a girl, I take it, 
as it is with a boy. The facts they get in col- 
lege they mostly lose, but the minds of some 
of them expand in the process of getting facts, 
and gain scope and power, and the ability to 
understand things, and increased interest in 
life, and capacity. Any way, so that the girls 
get their own." 

"If we've all got to vote presently," said Mrs. 
Brace, "no doubt the girls will have to go to 
college. I'm told we're not constitutional in 
our political remedies." 

"As to votes," said the Major, "it's a case 
of half -knowledge is a dangerous thing. The 
most able women that I happen to know, the 
most thoroughly trained and schooled in hard 
mental work, those that seem to me the deepest 
thinkers, don't want votes for women. Of 
course college at its best is only a step, but it 

136 



WE DINE OUT AND DISCUSS EDUCATION 

is a step toward sound thinking. I should be 
inclined to argue that college for a girl was a 
step toward giving her such a grasp upon human 
affairs and the conditions of life as would incline 
her to leave votes where they are, and spend 
her strength in other forms of expression. So 
if Maria sends herself to college, Van Pelt, it 
may be a process in the making of a really 
able anti-suffragist who will understand her- 
self, and other women and men, and can sift 
the chaff out of an argument. If the suffragists 
are to be beaten they will be beaten by the rest 
of women — those who have found their voca- 
tion and are happy in it, those who are busy, 
at least, whether happy or not, and cannot be 
harangued into excitement about politics, and 
those of first-rate mental powers and deep ex- 
perience, who can turn the whole matter over 
in their minds and conclude that woman suf- 
frage w^ould not help society. At any rate, 
woman suffrage or not, the way out lies in the 
direction of more power in the human mind, 
male and female, and not in less." 

We males continued to discuss this subject 
when the ladies had gone out and we went into 
the Major's library to burn tobacco. They 

137 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

set upon me as the latest transplantation from 
the college nursery into the garden of actual 
life, and demanded to know what I had got 
out of college. I said that for one thing I had 
got an acquaintance with several hundred men 
of about my own age, a good many of them 
now living in New York and the rest scattered 
variously about the country. Some of these 
men I knew intimately. All of them I knew 
well enough to have views about their qualities, 
and what I knew of them helped me to know 
other men, and gave me a measure which helped 
me to estimate men in general. I said that the 
way to know pictures was to be where you could 
see pictures, that the way to know men was, 
doubtless, to live with them and look them 
over, and that college — a big college — was a 
very convenient place to view a collection of 
young men, and learn to know the species. I 
said I didn't think any other thing we got in 
college was so important as that, because the 
other things you might learn in a big college 
could be learned anywhere if you took the nec- 
essary time and put in the necessary work. 
But the beauty about college was that you 
had the time there to add to knowledge in all 

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WE DINE OUT AND DISCUSS EDUCATION 

the ways, to learn the men and also to in- 
spect the books and examine the mental se- 
cretions of the professors, and that with rea- 
sonable gumption and diligence you could do 
it all. As to that end of it I quoted Tomlinson, 
who dined with us the other night. He is a 
still more recent college product than I am, and 
is still immersed in law studies. We got to talk- 
ing college and what we thought it had done for 
us, and he said, as I remember, that he could 
hardly recall a fact that he had learned in col- 
lege, but still he thought he had got great good 
out of it. When he was an undergraduate, he 
said, he was interested mostly in history, govern- 
ment, and economics. When he got out, his 
tastes entirely changed, and he got interested 
in literature and philosophy. *" Nowadays," said 
he, "I look forward to Sunday with the utmost 
impatience, and when it comes round I put it 
in with Spencer, Huxley, and Emerson. I am 
getting to be an authority on biology, I tell 
you, and wrestle with First Principles in a way 
to make my law-books jealous." 

They were quite interested in Tomlinson. 
The Major said he loved to see a boy come out 
of college with a desire to know something. 

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REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

"Now that boy," said he, "is really interested 
in what is going on, and wants to know why. 
It's delightful. He's got the inquiring mind, 
and, you see, college has developed it. Per- 
haps it would have developed anyhow, but at 
least the environment was favorable. It's a 
mighty inquisitive mind that develops on gen- 
eral lines if it is put hard into the game of 
money-grubbing at seventeen. And I don't 
know that the game of * society' is so much 
better for girls, though it is better in this: 
that its more strenuous phase doesn't last 
long, and after that a girl who has not yet 
formed an attachment has a great deal more 
leisure than a boy who is tied up to a job. 
We should recognize that 'society' is intended 
to give to girls that acquaintance with people, 
and the opportunities to observe them and 
handle them, that Jesup, here, values so much 
in college. Only 'society' does not include the 
systematic cultivation of recorded knowledge 
which the colleges still exact. If your Maria, 
now. Van Pelt, could supplement her social 
experiments with such fruits of college learn- 
ing as that young Tomlinson reports, she'd be 
ahead on it. Don't you think so.?^ She'd be 

140 



WE DINE OUT AND DISCUSS EDUCATION 

a more interesting woman, and have a livelier 
interest in life, and take hold of things more 
intelligently, and put in her spare time to better 
purpose, and have more fun. It is a great thing, 
it really is a great thing, to get the young 
started up the tree of knowledge; to get them 
to want to know, and start them climbing." 

"I agree with you. Major," said Mr. Van 
Pelt. "I quite agree with you. But Tomlin- 
son's a boy and Maria's a girl. Is that going 
to make a difference? Evidently Tomlinson's 
not going to let the trees obstruct his view of 
the forest. He seems to be after knowledge 
because it will help him to understand life. 
That's all the good there is in knowledge. Now 
I see women who seem to claw after knowledge 
as though it were a sunburst, or some such em- 
bellishment that adorned them to good pur- 
pose. I see their minds caked up with it, so 
that they don't work well. Some of the learned 
ladies are tiresome, just as some of the learned 
men are. They are not tiresome because they 
know too much, but because they lack the in- 
stinct that should tell them how to be interest- 
ing. You know a lively retail shop with a good 
show-window is always more interesting than 

141 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

a storage warehouse, no matter what treasures 
the warehouse may contain. I was saying the 
other day that Mrs. Jameson, the professor's 
wife, was such a charming lady, and a very 
accompHshed woman who heard me, said, *0h 
yes; but she doesn't know English literature.' 
What odds whether she knows English litera- 
ture or not if she is a charming lady? As much 
English literature as will make her lovelier and 
better able to express herself and more inter- 
esting and wiser is a good thing, and more than 
that is of very secondary importance except 
to a specialist. But that other lady who did 
know English literature like a specialist spoke 
of Mrs. Jameson's defective hold on it very 
much as though it were an absent sunburst or 
an unbecoming gown. As for Maria, I should 
hate to spoil a woman to make a scholar. But 
on the other hand, I should hate to stunt a 
woman to make a pretty lady." 

The Major said that in Maria's case he would 
rather take the first chance than the second. 
"But if you will encourage Maria to come 
around here to dinner. Van Pelt," he said, "I'll 
get Jesup to catch that young Tomlinson per- 
son, and we will examine his mind. Perhaps 

142 



WE DINE OUT AND DISCUSS EDUCATION 

Maria may be interested to look into it, and if 
she is, I should love to see her try. I don't 
know why, but when I hear of girls who are 
disposed to use their heads to think with, and 
who think it would be nice to know what's 
doing, I always have irresistible impulses to 
abet them. They may sometime — yes, any 
time — think out and disclose such interesting 
things. For, after all, women are women, and 
we men all grope and want to know when we 
speculate about them." 

He got up, went to a table drawer, and got 
out a little paper, which he gave me, saying 
"Here's a tract for you, Peregrine," and then 
we went back to the ladies. 

When Cordelia and I got home that night, 
and had viewed, approved, and tucked in our 
slumbering son, Samuel, and had discussed the 
company and their discourse, I brought out 
the Major's tract and read it to her, to wit: 

"What are regarded as the great prizes of 
life — ^fame, money, and such showy things — are 
nearly all things geared to the powers of men. 
It is easy to measure the successes of men. 
They stand out in plain sight to be weighed 
and examined. 

143 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

"But the successes of most of the successful 
women are much less tangible. As a rule they 
are contributions to life as it passes — influence, 
care, nurture, direction, companionship; valu- 
ables of the highest order, but which finally 
appear, not as properties of the woman from 
whom they proceeded, but of the men or the 
children who received them, and the families 
and communities that they have blessed. 

"The evidences of the success of men stand 
on pedestals and hang on walls and are recorded 
in books and occupy safe-deposit boxes in bank 
vaults. They stretch across the country in 
the form of steel rails or copper wires, or stand 
as buildings in stone and steel. On every one 
of them is the woman's hand. In every one 
of them she has had her share. There is no 
success of any kind, no power, no progress, 
which is not half hers. But ordinarily she does 
not much appear; not, at least, in a degree at 
all commensurate with her importance. Her 
work is not expressed — ^not much — in things. 
It is made flesh. 

"Is that unjust to her? Is it unfair that 
man should seem to outdo her? 

"Who shall say what is fair and what not 

144 



WE DINE OUT AND DISCUSS EDUCATION 

in the management of this universe? We 
flatter ourselves with the idea that the Almighty 
has chosen to express Himself in mankind. 
Admitting that, it is a daring critic who will 
assert that woman is disparaged because it is 
allotted to her to express herself in like fashion." 



VIII 

MY PROSPECTS IMPROVE 

HOW am I to get a garden for Cordelia? I 
love so to see her in a garden. They're 
fine for women. I like them myself, but the 
calls of the industry I pursue below Canal 
Street distract me from floriculture and per- 
sonal pokings in the earth. I don't even plan 
garden in any detail, which is partly, of course, 
because we have no actual garden possibilities 
yet to plan, though we still aspire to remote 
rhododendrons. But I get perceptible refresh- 
ment out of flower-beds, and very innocent and 
healing joys in the colors and texture and de- 
signs of flowers and the various patterns of 
millinery they affect. They are the great 
natural argument for art and beauty; immense- 
ly consoling and inspiring both for what they 
are and for what they intimate. Admiring 
them, even the imperfectly Scriptural, like me, 
revert instinctively to Scripture and to con- 

146 



MY PROSPECTS IMPROVE 

sideration of the lilies, that toil not, neither 
spin, and yet are in the front of the competition 
for looks, and fit for their beauty's sake to re- 
proach the doubts of them of little faith. Cer- 
tainly the Creator did not get up flowers for 
nothing. 

We must have a garden, if only for its pious 
uses, but for Cordelia it has admirable physical 
and mental uses besides. It gives her all the 
exercises — of mind, body, and spirit. Detached 
as she is from the soil she sprang from, in her 
mother's garden she gets personally back to 
earth, grubbing in it with trowels and like im- 
plements, with beads on her brow and blisters 
and mosquito bites wherever they happen to 
come, but with a zest and an enjoyment that 
comes near to passion. Our parents, happily, 
have pretty good gardens, and all the spring we 
have been improving the week-ends by getting 
near to nature on the paternal suburban reser- 
vations. This being Samuel's first spring, he 
has viewed it mostly from a perambulator, but, 
so seen, it has been profitable to him, and he 
has regarded its advances with perceptible ap- 
proval, especially when it has been warm 
enough, and dry enough, for him to sleep in- 

147 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

formally out-of-doors. No doubt the modern 
theory is sound that it is never too cold or too 
wet to sleep out-of-doors, but Samuel, being 
naturally robust, has never had to be absolutely 
modern in his observances. I leave it to any 
fair person if it is tolerable to think of his grow- 
ing up without close and long association with 
the green-and-brown earth .'^ Yet children do 
it by the hundred thousand in New York, and 
a fair proportion of them grow up stronger and 
better than a considerable proportion of the 
country-bred children. There are children, I 
am told, whom the city agrees with, and others 
— a minority — who suffer from the nervous ten- 
sion of it. It is agreed, I suppose, that all 
children are better off out of town in summer, 
but so are grown people, provided they go to a 
healthier place and can find fit employments, 
or make them for themselves. But the hardy 
children, like the hardy grown-ups, seem to get 
along in town or out. I find that in June the 
country air begins to taste different from the 
town air, and when I get off the cars in the 
rural districts I fill my lungs with great gulps 
of it, to the easement of my feelings. 

Bless me, how much we want, and how much 

148 



MY PROSPECTS IMPROVE 

it seems to cost to get it! Everybody wants a 
lot nowadays, and everybody, except the seri- 
ously opulent, seems to find the cost excessive. 
I suppose everybody wants for his child what 
Cordelia and I want for Samuel. Everybody 
seems to want to live some sort of a life that's 
worth living, and to get the price of it some- 
how. It is a large contract for society to meet 
these natural and reasonable desires; no wonder 
the world's machinery groans so, and that 
strikes and perplexities and trust trials so much 
abound, and that so much talk is in the air 
about the right of the people to rule. But rul- 
ing is a skilled job, and though it is none too 
well done, and never has been, the notion that 
"the people" are first-class experts at it who 
are kept out of power by interlopers seems to 
me more or less humorous. And so is the notion 
that we "people" have any great eagerness to 
rule. We haven't. That's one trouble. Al- 
most all of us want to go about our business and 
procure some of the ameliorations of existence. 
Ruling is hard work and small pay. ^^ want 
some one else to do it, if possible; some one 
who has a call and feels that he has a talent 
for government. These gentlemen who talk 

149 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

about the people ruling are usually gentlemen 
who have inward admonitions that they possess 
governmental talent. We choose between them, 
and to that extent we rule, and have been ruling 
for some time, and will rule, I guess, for some 
time to come. 

Cordelia and I would like to vote for more 
room in our flat. It's too tight. Now, with 
Samuel and his belongings to provide for, we 
haven't room to hang up and put away our 
things. We want a larger apartment, cheaper 
food, especially milk, reduction in the price of 
clothes, lower servants' wages — more, gener- 
ally, for our money. But I don't know just 
how to vote for these things without running 
up against the reasonable needs of other people. 
All the measures I would favor as suitable to 
make my earnings go further seem constituted 
to make somebody else's earnings less. That 
wouldn't hinder me from voting to reduce the 
tariff, because I think it ought to be reduced, 
but I don't want to vote any less wages for 
Matilda Finn. Demand and taxation fix rents; 
how am I going to vote them cheaper? If the 
Meat Trust makes meat unduly dear, I'm against 
it; but I am not at all sure that it does. If the 

150 



MY PROSPECTS IMPROVE 

excessive multiplication of grocers makes pota- 
toes high, it is a pity, but how am I going to 
vote against it? I can vote, when the chance 
comes, for the best city government that is 
offered, and the best obtainable bargain about 
public utilities, and supervision of milk, and 
such things; and I can vote for tariff reform, 
and trust regulation, and conservation in so 
far as those desirables are affected by retaining 
or dismissing the present administrators of the 
Federal government; but after I have voted 
all I can — and expressed my primary prefer- 
ence, and initiated and recalled and referended, 
if those privileges are offered me — it wall still 
remain undoubtedly that if I want more closet- 
room for Cordelia and a continuing residence 
in town and a garden somewhere, I've got to 
get in more money. So I'm in just the same 
case as the mill-hands and the miners and 
everybody else who has been on a strike lately, 
except that I haven't got to strike unless I 
want to, and I sha'n't want to until I have 
an offer of something better than I've got now. 
It makes me ashamed to keep wanting more 
money, even though the mill-hands and miners 
and the rest feel just as I do about it. But, 

11 151 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

after all, that want is the great spur of civiliza- 
tion. If most of us didn't want more closet- 
room, and a garden, and a roof -garden sleeping- 
apartment for Samuel, and a little larger 
dinner-parties than we can give as it is and 
more of them, and food, clothes, education, 
leisure, travel, automobiles, and all the other 
necessaries and unnecessaries, I suppose all 
progress would slacken. The whole apparatus 
of civilization seems to be geared to these more 
or less humble human desires. Politics is a 
sort of rash that breaks out on bodies of men 
that are tired with too much work, or hungry, 
or starved in their spirits, or thwarted in their 
aspirations, or who need more closet-room and 
gardens. The politicians are not rulers, after 
all; they are doctors, making diagnoses, and 
offering prescriptions and treatments, and tak- 
ing fees, and flunked a good deal of the time 
by the symptoms of the patient. A real cure 
of human ailments by politics is inconceivable. 
There are too many people, and they want more 
than there is, and if they were all satisfied for 
once at a quarter past six, there would be a lot 
more of them, and they would have developed 
a lot more wants, by seven o'clock. But that 

152 



MY PROSPECTS IMPROVE 

only proves that politics is a continuing job, 
that never will lapse, and never will be finished 
so long as there are folks on the earth. 

It is wonderful what is accomplished; how 
we endure labor, privations, disappointment, 
restricted closet-space, and lack of gardens, and 
go on comparatively orderly and patient, get- 
ting what we can and going without the rest. 
Shops are full of goods and the doors open; 
trains run, crowds surge here and there, strikers 
strike and pickets picket, judges sit, juries find, 
the polls open and close, and the papers tell us 
who was elected. Somehow, in all this muddle, 
life is fairly safe, most of the people are fed, 
babies get attention, the dead are buried, the 
processes of existence go on. 

The whole of politics seems secondary be- 
cause the whole material side of life, even gar- 
dens and closet-room, seems secondary. I guess 
that is what saves the world alive. There are 
not enough material things to satisfy everybody. 
I doubt indeed if there are enough to satisfy 
anybody. But of the things of the mind and 
of the things of the spirit there is a boundless 
supply, and any one who can may help himself. 

We scramble for things as though they were 

153 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

all there was, and yet the main joys of life are 
in ideas — in religion, in love, in beauty, in duty, 
in truth — things that no trust can monopolize, 
and which come tariff-free through any port. 
They are the realities, and these bodily things 
are mostly shadows, indispensable, to be sure 
— things that it is a reproach and a high in- 
convenience to be without, but which take care 
of themselves so long as the realities prosper. 

Well, I have got a boost. Major Brace has 
suggested to me that I move my tools over to 
his oflSce this fall and become a partner in his 
firm. The suggestion is agreeable to me, and 
I have closed with it. His firm is undergoing 
reorganization. At present it is Brace & Ket- 
cham, but Mr. Ketcham's wife has fallen into 
so much money that, having also some savings 
of his own, he feels the need of foreign travel, 
country air, and like delights, and proposes to 
retire from active practice and concern himself 
with self-improvement, cows, and public or 
quasi-public duties, like being a director in 
banks and corporations, serving on committees, 
or even running for public office. There seems 
to be a great deal for competent and experienced 

154 



MY PROSPECTS IMPROVE 

citizens to do whenever they have acquired the 
means of support and can afford to take nominal 
pay, or none, for their services. The new firm 
is to be Brace, Witherspoon & Jesup; which last 
is me. It will be a strong firm. The Major has 
experience and connections; Mr. Witherspoon 
has knowledge, especially of law, and appalling 
diligence; and I have a living to make for Cor- 
delia and Samuel and myself, and everything 
to buy, including a city mansion, a country 
residence, some automobiles, and a garden with 
rhododendrons in it. When I think how modest 
my proportion of the firm's winnings is to be, 
and how much it is to buy, my arithmetical 
talents are strained to compute the princely 
affluence that must be coming out of the new 
firm to the Major. 

Anyhow, my circumstances will be eased 
enough for us to move into a more commodious 
flat next fall, which is important. The modi- 
fication in my prospects pleases me very much. 
I am attached to the Major. He is good to 
be with. I feel confident that he will make a 
living, and either make it honestly or make it 
look so honest to me that my self-esteem will 
not be wounded by a lot of compunctions. I 

155 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

think so because I believe he is at least as 
scrupulous as I am, and has more experience 
in adjusting his scruples to the facts of life. 
And that is a mighty delicate matter. If you 
can't do it you get nowhere, and if you overdo 
it you get eventually, I presume, to that ideality 
that we call "hell." I don't know that I should 
necessarily mind that, for it is possible that 
the attractions of hell may have been under- 
rated; but I hate consumedly the processes of 
getting there as I see them. The by-path by 
drink is so far out of my line that I don't have 
to take serious thought about it; nor yet about 
the propensity to divagations in feminine com- 
panionship, which makes some persons so much 
trouble; but I believe I may say without affec- 
tation that I would hate the detachment from 
that ideality which we call "truth." Surely 
the greatest possible luxury in life is to think 
you are on the right side; to know the truth and 
follow it, or at least, since we are all so fallible, 
to think you know it and are on its trail. To 
think that I was going to practise law merely 
as the agent of the astute, filching unwarranted 
profits from the simple, would be quite intoler- 
able, of course. It would be so at least as long 

156 



MY PROSPECTS IMPROVE 

as I continued to be any good, for I should 
think of it as a progress to "hell"; and when it 
ceased to bother me, that would be the sign 
that I had arrived. That's the kind of hell the 
idea of which is repellent — the hell in which 
the damned are fat and hard and solvent, and 
relentlessly and eternally gainful for themselves. 
Ugh ! They make me sick; at least the thought 
of them does. When you come to look for 
them in the flesh, of course they have their 
human modifications and are often lean, jo- 
cund, and charming. 

The Major says there's a new morality grow- 
ing up that will express itself presently in some 
new commandments, or a new interpretation 
of the sixth. Stealing, as heretofore imder- 
stood, has been limited, he says, to taking from 
some one something that was his. But there 
is a growing sentiment that it applies also to 
hogging an unconscionable amount of things 
desirable for the mass of folks, but to which 
none of them had established legal ownership. 
As "the people" grow stronger and more in- 
telligent there is more interest in having them 
get what should be coming to them. So the 
Major looks for the evolution of a command- 

157 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

ment to the general effect of "Thou shalt not 
take more than thy share," and for lots of legis- 
tation based on it. And since what anybody's 
share is depends on all manner of circumstances, 
and is highly debatable, and is sure to get into 
court again and again, he looks for busy — and 
profitable — times for our profession. 

Meanwhile the bulk of the law business is 
not a wrangle between the wolf and the lamb, 
with all the best talent retained for the wolf. 
A good deal of it is wrangles between wolves, 
wherein it is just as virtuous to be on one side 
as the other; and a lot more of it is not wrangle 
at all, but a tame exercise of the lawyer's true 
profession of keeping order in the world. 

All the same, it must be embarrassing to any 
lawyer's ethical self-esteem always to be the 
defender, at a high price, of the strong. It 
can't be easy to avoid it, once a man gets a 
considerable reputation; but I guess it does 
pinch. Politically, of course, it is very ex- 
pensive, and that, without much regard for 
the truth that when Strength is right, even 
though it is incorporated, it is just as important 
to society that it should get its dues under the 
law as though it were somebody else. The risks 

158 



MY PROSPECTS IMPROVE 

of an employment are one of the considerations 
on which its rate of payment is based, and in 
this legal employment to which I seem com- 
mitted, the risk of discredit may well be one 
basis for extra large fees. Disreputability is 
bound to rub off of clients on their lawyers, 
provided there is enough of it, and the associa- 
tion is long enough continued, and highly enough 
paid, or insuflficiently varied by professional 
associations of another sort. 

I should not like to be committed bodily to 
the side of the Haves in my legal experiences, 
and I know I never shall be so long as I am in 
the same firm with the Major. Neither do I 
want to tie up to impossible enthusiasms and 
altruisms; and to plans that won't work, and 
to fabulous expectations of making the earth 
equally comfortable for all its residents irre- 
spective of their powers and qualities. The 
Major does not go in for those phantoms. He 
will not always be right, but he will never be 
systematically impossible. 

I guess Witherspoon is going to get rich. He 
is terribly smart; so smart, and so nearly sound- 
minded, and so nearly drink-proof, that, with 
the start he has, it will be virtually impossible 

159 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

for him to stay poor. If not myself, I would 
rather be Witherspoon than any one I see about. 
I could not afford to be the Major; he is too old. 
I have too much to do, and too much expecta- 
tion of liking to do it, to wish to be he, much 
as I like him. Witherspoon is older than I am, 
older by nine or ten years, I guess, but I could 
almost afford that advancement in years for 
what I might gain in ability by having his head 
instead of mine. Not, of course, that I would 
be he, unless it was compulsory that I should 
be some one other than I am. A property that 
one has taken so much pains to improve as me 
becomes dear to the owner. I rate among 
improvements Cordelia and Samuel (though 
you may call them liabilities if you like), all 
that I know, my acquaintance, my reputation, 
the repairs done on my teeth (which were quite 
expensive), advertisement as so far acquired 
(except as already mentioned under acquaint- 
ance and reputation), a little life insurance paid 
up to date, and there must be a lot of other 
improvements I can't think of. To offset all 
that, I have expensive habits (like Cordelia and 
Samuel) and the probability of others. I smoke 
and drink, though inexpensively as yet, and like 

160 



MY PROSPECTS IMPROVE 

better food and rather better clothes than I am 
entitled to. 

One thing that I admire about Witherspoon 
is his clothes; they are so bad — or rather he 
is so oblivious to them. I guess they are pretty 
good clothes, but he is apt to wear them like 
a man in the woods; I see him sometimes going 
about in this polite community in rough-look- 
ing, unshiny, russet shoes, a flannel shirt with a 
soft collar, his trousers turned up, not precisely 
but casually; and if he has on black shoes, like 
as not they are not polished. That is liable to 
be his working dress. He does better at times; 
does better doubtless if he happens to think 
of it or his wife tells him, and he togs himself 
out properly when he goes out to dinner; but 
his mind is not on raiment, nor much on de- 
tails of living, anyhow. Presently, I suppose, 
his wife will say he must have a valet, and his 
clothes will be pressed and laid out for him for 
the rest of time, and he will put them on and 
always go forth shining. But he's fine as he is. 

It is grand to be enough of a man to be worth 
a servant to do all one's chores. It is also 
grand meanwhile to be able to dress as inatten- 
tively as Witherspoon does. If he were lazy 

161 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

he couldn't do it, nor yet if he had not on him 
so many of the marks of a first-class man. If 
he were just ordinary, you'd be displeased with 
him for not being clean-shaven, but when he 
smiles and begins to talk you don't care whether 
he shaved yesterday or the day before, nor 
whether his shoes are blacked, nor what kind 
of a collar he has on. 

I'm not that way at all. I have to wear 
respectable clothes, brush my hair and teeth, 
shave every morning, black my shoes, and pay 
attention to millinery. I succeed in all these 
details, and would make, I suppose, an accept- 
able body-servant for a really great man, or a 
fairly good housemaid, if it were not that I am 
able, under Providence, to put the remnant of my 
time after attending to my own details to more 
profitable use than doing ordinary details for 
some one else. Details I shall do, no doubt, for 
some time to come if not forever, but they will 
be fairly remunerative details, I hope, requir- 
ing judgment and knowledge. 

It's all service, and all that matters much to 
the moralist is that each of us should come, 
somehow, where he belongs, and get the sort 
of job he can learn to be good at, and delve at 

162 



MY PROSPECTS IMPROVE 

it until a better one calls him — if it does. But 
of course to find one's proper job is a great 
achievement in life, being the one that engages 
my energies at present. Also to find a man 
proper for a job that needs doing seems to be 
a considerable achievement, bigger or less big, 
according to the size of the job, but supremely 
important when the job is a vital matter like 
the Presidency sometimes, or the discovery of 
an effectual general in war, or a revolutionary 
leader. The processes by which the top men 
come to the top are as interesting as anything 
in history. Indeed, they almost constitute 
history. Usually they are processes of trying 
out, and it seems that the qualifications for a 
great place must include, as a rule, the ability 
to get the place, and, if it is political, to get it 
away from somebody else. But the unpolitical 
places don't seem so much to be wrested from 
anybody. The most powerful men just come 
to their own. Commonly they make the places 
which they occupy, and the places grow with 
them, until, when they get out, there is a gap- 
ing vacancy to be filled. 

That is not the sort of place for which the 
Major has selected me. Not yet. It's just a 

163 



REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND 

chance to do some work as it comes along, and 
make a place, possibly, which can be recognized 
as definite, commodious, and profitable because 
of some scarcity of the qualities required to fill 
it. I have great confidence in the Major, and 
feel strongly that his judgment in choosing 
persons and foreseeing labors for them is excel- 
lent, and I have faith in particular, as I have 
intimated, in his sagacity in selecting Wither- 
spoon. So I am a good deal pleased that he 
should have invited me. 



THE END 



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